Today is always the best day..........

I have a lot of online friends who I never have met in person, yet I know them well and chat with them often. One of those friends recently put up a blog entry that I think helps to summarize just how great the gift of life is and never to take any days for granted...........


Bonjour mes amis! As promised today tells the deepest tale I have to offer. Should you be one of my regular readers of my Magic column, you will already know this. Should you be on my staff last year, or on housing staff this year, again, you will already know.

As a result, you can go ahead and click the back button. However, for the rest of you, this will be news of a highly significant nature. I figure that since this is already out there, I might as well be up front with everybody.

As a quick review of my past, in 8th grade, my mother died, I broke my wrist and was unable to be on the basketball team despite working my way up to the starting five in practice, and then my father announced that we would be moving away from my previous home, family and school in Boone County. It was a tough year, and yet, in many ways, it was my greatest. I overcame a lot of stigma from fourth grade when I publicly told people I was gay as a joke, and they caught on and the school teased me. I was popular enough, secure in my faith, and I was in my niche. Moving was a tough thing for me, especially since I had lost my mother four months or so before we moved. The anniversary of her death is in one weeks. That makes this blog even more poignant.

My mother died in her sleep from heart complications due to a condition referred to as Huntington's Disease. I was the last to speak to her before she died. I remember being called down the principal's office on a cold October morning and passing by Mr. Weikel in the hallway and beaming that I had been called to the office. You either got called for something good or something bad, and I hadn't done anything wrong (which was, in itself, something unusual).

I came to the office and saw my father in the hallway. What was he doing here? He quietly ushered me into the teacher's lounge where Mr. Johnson was as well. I had no idea what was about to be said but I figured it was bad. My mother had a deteriorating condition with no cure. We knew she would die, but no matter how you steel yourself, you are never ready to hear that your mother passed away.

I watched many people die that day. My grandmother came to the house to bury her only daughter, and she was forlorn. It is not natural to bury one's own child. My father withdrew into his role as a pastor and would not come out again for some time. My sister kept wanting mother back and did not understand what was happening. I understood.

I returned to my literature class and announced that my mother had died. I figured that they had a right to know. I sat down in my chair and began to cry, out loud, right there is the classroom. Mr. Peters came over and rubbed my back. After about a minute, I asked if I could have the worksheet that the rest of the class was working on. Everybody deals with grief differently, and for me, her death had sunk in, and I was ready to move on.

I shed many other tears over my mother during my life, including one as I write these very paragraphs I love her and still miss her to this day, but the tear in my eye does not stop me from writing, and that day, they did not stop me from working on whatever worksheet was in front of me.

Here's the main issue and the reason that I bring it up now. Huntington's Disease is genetic. There is a 50/50 chance of passing it to your child.

When I went to consider grad school, I decided that it was time to find out if I had it or not. Plans in your life change depending on whether or not you expect to live until 40 or a normal retirement age.

Huntington's Disease is a disease that strikes your central nervous system. It begins with a palsy – a slight tick or motion that is uncontrolled. Over time, the palsies and ticks grow, and you begin making a lot of uncoordinated spontaneous movements.

You begin to lose the ability to write, to eat, to walk, to sleep. You eat less and burn a lot of energy, so a lot of people that suffer from Huntington's will suffer from malnutrition. Your mind starts to go as well. You experience memory loss, change of personality, and lose your ability to comprehend and understand things. Over time you become wheelchair bound, then bed ridden, and then eventually some part of your body gives out and you die. It could be your lungs and you suffocate, or your heart , in my mother's case, or something else. There is no cure for Huntington's Disease, and no drug you can take to stave off the effects.

The tests came back positive.

I have the Disease with the same degree that my mother had it. I can expect to contract it at about the same time and die at about the same time – 38 and 43.

In December I turn 31.

There will be no last minute reprieve, no miracle cure, no drug that will save me. In seven years or so I will have the first sign, and it will quickly and irreparably go down from there.

I think I always knew I had the disease. The beast that slew my mother and her father and his father before him will die with me. I have no children, no wife, no long term girlfriend that will become a wife. I'm just me. I enjoy my life, and I'm happy to have it.

I'd prefer to be alive with Huntington's than to have never lived at all.

That's why London was my last hurrah. It was my final chance to go out and do something, my last adventure before I retire. What is left for me but complacency? Hopefully this new dream of writing will succeed where the previous one failed. It's a much harder dream, but I have to keep trying at something. I cannot become a cog in the machine, waiting until for every tick of the clock, every turn of the calendar to bring me that much closer to my doom.

I will do what I can to make these last seven years matter.

Thanks,

Abe