Sad Sack

It wasn’t much of a day. I spent it sick in bed. Every hour or so, I’d wake up and check my blog to see there were anymore “I want to spit in your face” comments. I’ve gotten two of these in the past few days, the second one also called me the scum of the earth.

The spitting in the face gambit felt vaguely exotic to me like something Prince Faisal would say to one of his rivals in Lawrence of Arabia while the camels pawed the sand outside his tent, but, no, Prince Faisal was too cultured to be so crude. So never mind Prince Faisal, you get my drift, it seemed extremely, extremely foreign to me. And not all that pleasant even though I’m a freak for comments.

But checking to see if there was more spitting going on in my blog comments was just one of my many activities today. I took a shower. This took a full two hours of contemplation as I looked at the bathroom door and wondered if I had the stamina to walk there. Thinking about it would exhaust me and I’d fall back asleep. I thought I should be hungry so I texted my daughter in California and asked her to bring jello. It was a foolish question and I knew it. No one eats jello anymore. Why is that? Why is having a colonoscopy the only occasion that involves jello? Why was there to be no jello for me?

I lie there for a long while and realized that we had popsicles in the freezer. I only had to gather myself and walk downstairs to get one. My daughter texted, “Can you make it downstairs?”

Outside, the skies turned cloudy then sunny then cloudy again. I felt like the girl in The Last Leaf, the O. Henry story about a girl who delays her death until the last leaf falls off the vine on the building she sees from her sickbed. She waits and waits but the leaf never falls because some tricky artist friend painted it on the wall, so then fed up with her own death watch, she decides to recover. I don’t remember if she ever finds out about the leaf.

I wondered over the past two days, how long someone could lie in bed, alternately sleeping and staring out the window until doing so itself caused some kind of malady. I should get up and do something, start fighting back. So I went to get the popsicle and paid an overdue parking ticket.

Then I went back to bed where I embarked on what easily was the 15th nap of the day. When my husband came home, he said, “You’re where I left you this morning.” Maybe, I thought, but so much has gone on and I’m exhausted.

I’d be such an embarrassment as a really sick person. If I got some terrible disease, my husband and kids would never be able to say that I was valiant, that I never complained and that I fought the disease with every fiber of my being because I loved them so much. It wouldn’t be true. If the past two days are any indication, I would just give up. My obituary would read, “Jan Wilberg, who died after immediately giving up and not even contemplating a struggle.”

What a sorry state of affairs. I trace it all back to the spitting. It put me in a bad frame of mind.