Truth Tables

This is a more serious post, but it's been plauging me all week.

So many similar things have happened to me or people I love in the recent months that when this happened it really took over my thoughts.

My mom has a very good friend from college and she lives with her husband in Connecticut. They're great. They seem like a great couple, loving, fun, open minded etc.

The day after Thanksgiving my mom's friends who I'll rename Sue and her husband who I'll call Dan, had off from work. Now, Dan has diabetes and it's gotten increasingly worse through the years. He's always altering his diet to see how it effects the diabetes. The past two years it's seemed like his equilibrium was off and it wavered between bad and worse.

Friday Sue left at noon to go run some errands. Dan stayed at home. Sue returned at approx 4 o'clock to Dan passed out on the couch his glasses and the table in front of him broken. She tried to wake him up. Nothing. She kept trying and he mummbled a bit, but he was totally out of it and acted like he didn't know who she was. She called 911.

The EMTs stayed for awhile as she stood by and his vitals got worse. They brought him out to the ambulance and as Sue was walking out with the last EMT, the EMT said to her, "Do you always keep that vodka bottle there?" Sue explained that they had had cocktails on Thanksgiving so maybe that was why it was next to the couch, but she didn't really see why it'd be there.

Dan had a blood alchohol level of 3.84. He's been drunk for 2 years. That was the problem with his equilibrium.

Sue is not a dumb woman, do not jump to that conclusion. People say "you don't have to be dumb to be blind or to be in denial" but sometimes things happen that do totally blindside you. Dan and Sue would have cocktails occasionally and he never seemed to over indulge. Many times she'd ask him to make her a cocktail and he would make one for her, but not himself. Why would she ever think he was drinking on the sly?

It's like you're sailing along and then life just stops and everything that was true to you at one moment isn't in the next. It's like in algebra when you do.. I think they're called logarhythms. When P is true, then Q is false etc etc. So when you find out that one thing that you thought was true, the thing you thought was most true in fact- like Dan's honesty to Sue, then what else.

About a year ago something happened to me that made feel this way- like everything I knew was false. Now my world has been thrown up again by something I trusted in my head and my heart even more. So if P and Q are false when I thought for so long that they were true.. then what? What's everything else? If the things that I'm most positive of turned out to be wrong and if this happens all the time, like to Sue, then how are we to live happy lives when one day, we're running an errand, or trying on clothing, or on vacation with friends and suddenly that life ends. Unexpectedly. With no warning. And we can never run that errand or try on that dress or go to that place with your friends without thinking that life may end. And for that matter, what's the next thing you'll be doing when life ends.