Kudzu Queen
If you’ve ever had the misfortune to watch a loved one slowly waste away from a terminal disease, you’ve probably got a Living Will for yourself. My Living Will states that in the event of horrific illness or accident, with no reasonable hope of recovery, I am to be allowed to die.
No heroic medical measures. DNR (Do not resuscitate). I don’t want my family to have to decide when to pull the plug on me, even though some of my relatives might derive a great deal of glee from it. When it is my time to go, just let me go. I’m really anxious to meet up with Warren Zevon on the Other Side, anyhow, so don’t delay me when it’s my turn to make the crossing, OK?
I wish there were such a thing as a Living Will for relationships. Pre-nuptial agreements are great, but they don’t begin at the beginning. A contractual document is needed for the dating stage. It wouldn’t concern any division of property, because when a dating relationship is over with, both parties should get their own stuff back.
The way to ensure this is to get your stuff back before you break up, ESPECIALLY if your stuff includes any Waylon Jennings CDs or naked photos of yourself. If you don’t get Waylon or your naughty pics back pre-break up, you won’t get them back at all, unless you are willing to bring a firearm into the equation. My general policy is to avoid dealing with a grand jury if at all possible, so I am reluctant to resort to sidearms. Careful planning makes more sense.
I was doing the post-mortem analysis, the mental autopsy, on a previous dating relationship. If I could figure out exactly what killed it, maybe I could make a different kind of mistake next time. One thing I concluded was that the love died a long time ago, but neither one of us wanted to be the one to pull the plug. That’s a hard call to make, as anybody who has ever had to have a beloved companion animal put to sleep knows.
I ain’t going to get into another dating kind of thing without a signed agreement from the other party that when the thing is dead, we will let it be dead. No heroic measures. No watching pathetically from the hospice bedside, trying with desperate hopefulness to interpret some accidental act as purposeful, conscious movement towards recovery.
Comatose folks sometimes will exhibit a twitch or a muscle spasm. The family wants very much to believe that it is deliberate movement, indicative of an imminent flight into health. Same thing happens with relationships that should have been allowed to die naturally, but were instead hooked up to intensive emotional life support. A random act of kindness, a gift here and there, an absent-minded caress…we see a vibrant, living love in these things, because that is what we desperately want to see. And because we’re both codependent as all get-out. Meanwhile, the life support machines chug on, maintaining what is only an empty shell of a love relationship. A vegetative, comatose, one-power-failure-away-from-flatlining relationship. But hell, as long as it’s still breathing, there’s hope, right?
I don’t know anybody that likes to admit defeat. I don’t know anybody that enjoys the death of a dream. It’s hard to face the fact that what I really loved was the dream. You can take the man and you can take the whole sad, sorry, fundamentally dishonest relationship away from me without very much trouble. But when I finally surrender the dream, it’s got claw marks all over it. That poet was right when he said, “Dreams die hard.”
OK, back to the pre-dating agreement. Both parties will have to agree to not resuscitate the relationship if it exhibits any of the following sure signs of being a terminal case:
1. Lies. This includes omissions, evasions and obfuscations. A lie is a lie is a lie, no matter what pretty euphemism you call it by.
2. You feel worse about yourself when you’re with your lover than you do when you’re without him/her. You’ve noticed a whole bunch of serious, glaring defects about yourself since you started dating this person. The person offers to help you change for the better. THINK: If you weren’t acceptable to begin with, why did he/she ever start dating you? You have obviously hooked-up with a mental patient. It would be a nice relationship-concluding gesture to offer to drive the person back to his/her room at Searcy, thus saving them cab fare.
3. One-sidedness. One person is doing all the giving/driving/buying/sacrificing. The other is taking. It’s pretty easy to be a taker, but a lopsided relationship like this is bad for both parties and will surely end in a violent episode, as soon as the martyr’s, I mean giver’s, resentment boils over into volcanic rage (which it surely will. It’s not a matter of IF, it’s a purely a matter of WHEN.). You really don’t want your co-workers to see you on the evening news for messy personal stuff like that.
The pre-dating contract should not be some informal, trifling document. The signatures must be witnessed, and the whole shebang should be notarized. If Death is detected lurking in the fledgling relationship (see above indicators), both parties must immediately call the whole thing off, and go out and meet new people. Get on with your lives, dammit. Quit wasting time trying to keep a dead thing alive.
I could find a recently road-killed possum and hook it up to life support. I could keep that possum artificially breathing, and its blood artificially pumping, for as long as I wanted to (or until the hospital staff discovered my project and I was led out in a straitjacket). But that’s not real life. And that’s not love. That’s just sick.
Contact Tamara Ducote at TDDucote6@aol.com.
Archives
Kudzu Queen
