Dear Sister

October 3, 2025 / Hermionejh

I listened to a message you had left that sunny September day in 2023, letting me know you were in the hospital – ‘doing okay,’ although you said you were feeling very weak.

It’s hard to listen to now because you’re gone. It was just three months from your diagnosis to your death. As we talked during those months, you said that it had been a couple of years that things were starting to not feel right. You said you were tired all the time, and you couldn’t get to your doctor, and when you finally did, he minimized what was happening. Unfortunately, you weren’t someone who would demand being adequately treated.

By the time they had ordered tests when you had called me from the hospital, it was already basically too late (although no one could know that in the moment).

But I think you did know. I think that’s why you had me take you home that night. I’m sure you were terrified, and you were trying to run from it. I understand it now in a way that I didn’t before.

I’m so sorry that we never got back to the kind of friendship we had in our twenties. I don’t really know what happened, but maybe it was just time moving on and life shaping us.

I hope you know that I always loved you, and always wished that we could be friends again. I know that you loved me, but I didn’t feel like you liked me very much, and I felt hurt and defensive.

If there’s another place where I’ll see you again, I hope that we’re in our best selves with each other. But I’ll be glad to see you no matter what.

I’m also glad I saved your message – I’ll take the bitter to have the sweet.

Fleeting Time

October 16, 2024March 7, 2025 / Hermionejh

I have not embraced becoming an adult. Many of the adults I knew growing up made adulthood seem terrible. Becoming an older adult (an elder – perish the fucking thought!), has happened kicking and screaming – I’ll let you know if that changes. That’s the rub about being human and subject to the conditions of the material world.

This is an interesting world, but I’ve just started to feel like I have some command of my life, and now I enter my elderhood when the body starts falling apart and can no longer do what my younger self wanted to do but couldn’t manage.

Yes, books, songs, comedies, and tragedies have exhausted the topic, but I’ve not been here before – and likely neither have you.

I met a woman in her twenties who was already having plastic surgery to game aging (good luck with that), and another who constantly buys potions, pills, infrared devices, and anything else she can barely (or not) afford to keep collagen and her telomeres from reduction or corruption – although ultra rich people like Jeff Bezos are working to solve that. You’ll have to be in the ultra rich category to benefit from it. Immortality or near-immortality won’t come cheap. Also, there isn’t enough resources on Earth for everybody to be immortal. Maybe that’s why Elon Musk wants to colonize Mars?

A better solution might be to somehow have a human brain implanted in an android shell, but that human brain would still be subject to aging – and android shells would be too. All material corrodes or otherwise breaks down eventually. It’s an immutable reality of the material world. But, hundreds of years alive are better than our current sub-100 average.

Bryan Johnson lives an algorithmically driven daily regimen to keep his body and mind 18, or as close to that as he can. His goal isn’t to cheat death but to live an optimal life.

My brain got trauma wired as a young child, and continuing into my young adulthood – and so many of us are born with, or develop, challenges to living a well-regulated life.

We’re here for a minute, really. What are we going to do with it?

I’d like to be more highly functioning. That’d be nice. Less depression, less anxiety, more embracing of whatever time I have left, and write that book I have wanted to write for at least a decade.

I have watched friends drop off sideways to cancer and other terrible illnesses. I have lived long enough to see most of my aunts and uncles reach their 90’s and 100’s before finally succumbing to various conditions or simply wearing out. My maternal grandfather lived to 102, but was mostly blind and deaf at the end. We haven’t solved those problems yet, even if we can live in a better physical condition.

We all come into a tumultuous world. It can seem like we were born too late or too soon, and that’s why reincarnation is such an attractive concept. This might not be our one shot. Some people claim to remember past lives, but most of us come into the world with a blank slate, oblivious of any prior existence (if there were one, which I doubt).

Our species seems to seek power and domination above all else. Nothing is ever enough. We also have the possibility of peaceful and contented lives, and that’s what I’ve been trying to achieve. It’s been an elusive goal that I’m still working toward.

Contentment doesn’t mean a risk-free, or a challenge-free life. It’s a choice, and a commitment, and not all of us have the ability to choose. Less pain and strife means more time for focused creativity and a fulfilling life.

I don’t know if I’m getting wiser, but I certainly have more awareness and experience. The balance of time growing shorter is also a good motivator. It’s do before I die now, even if I could reasonably live another forty years. There’s no way to know what time will bring, but my memory of my early years is growing less sharp.

Maybe I’ll try Bryan Johnson’s protocol. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Mapped Out

February 18, 2024 / Hermionejh

I don’t know if it’s accurate to say that my body – especially my face – is more and more a map of my life, but it feels that way.

The permanent crease above my left eyebrow lets me know that my quizzical expression is lopsided – it seems my right eyebrow doesn’t care to express itself much. The same goes for my ever-deepening smile creases that have a deeper groove on my left side than my right, and how apt it is for an inner life and outward life often at odds that has left visible reminders.

I chide myself for wanting to erase those lines and creases – my vanity wanting a smooth, un-lined face forever.

I have lived. The years keep going by leaving time’s impression, not really having much to do with who we are inside. We are semi-ageless. It seems like it would be a tragedy to stay the same – never deepening our understanding, knowledge or experience.

I get it that so many would strike that bargain – and are doing their best to keep time’s imprint off their bodies. Half of me wants that too.

Wrinkles do not confer, and should not imply, wisdom, after all – just that we’ve lived long enough for our bodies to start breaking down.

The work to stay healthy and functional seems to fill up more time and can feel daunting.

It’s probably a question of available energy than motivation, but I am more alive when I’m doing things I love, and especially getting out into the woods for long hikes.

As stupid as it sounds, I’ve started understanding how we’re everything and everything is us. I have the same elements as the chair I sit on, the floor I walk on, the metal in the ladle and the clay or ceramic of the bowl that contains the soup I’m eating, that also contains the elements of my body.

I’m not even stoned! But, yes, we are made from those elements too.

This isn’t new information to any of us, but the perception or feeling is different. It feels more visceral now. Is that wisdom? I think my brain just loves rabbit holes.

The minutiae of the outer world has become more fascinating.

I never had time nor inclination much for that when I was younger – not that I didn’t appreciate the beauty and intricacy of the world and the phenomenal unlikelihood and mystery of life itself.

Maybe it’s because I’m no longer preoccupied with raising my child or finding someone to share my time or my life with. I suppose it’s different for everyone.

Maybe it’s also because I feel my mortality more strongly than ever and I want to be here as fully as possible for the time left to me.

As for any of us, my last day here could be today.

It’s like a deadline is fast approaching and the urgency to get get my shit together to have my portfolio or the highlight reel of my time here ready for who or whatever might review it on the other side from here feels more imperative.

That might not at all be a thing, but my anxiety about the possibility is clearly nerve-wracking.

Will they like me? Did I do alright? Will they forgive me if I fucked up the one job I was supposed to do here (the instructions of which somehow got lost) – or was I just supposed to wing it all along – and we’ll all laugh about the big tangled mess I made?

I hope it’s the latter because the worry is being mapped out all over my ever-creasing face.

I Miss My Mom

August 31, 2022 / Hermionejh / 4 Comments

I was going to write about how rock and roll aging is, but my mother zoomed into my awareness and I dearly miss her. She was fucked up. She trashed her body with alcohol and guilt and shame. Sounds familiar.

Regardless of anything else, I was close to her. She was my mom. She was important to me. She was the person I went to when things sucked – even if we didn’t talk about it. We’d have a crappy cup of coffee, and I just got to be in her presence. She made me. There is no other person on this earth – this heaven – this hell – that can say that.

I have dear, dear friends – and I would be deeply angry if they leave this world before me, especially Dimitra who has been here for me since I was 10 and she was 11. We are soul mates. If there was any type of organization before zooming into this world, we made a plan to stick together no matter how far apart we got. It’s just how it is.

I love my family – deservedly or not. That does not mean I accept terrible treatment, and they are on notice now in a way they never were before. I have self-love and self-respect that I did not have a good handle on for most of my life, so I was often treated less well than I deserved, or at least as I felt I should be treated. Now, however, I think my siblings know that this life is fleeting, and possibly only love remains. Only connection can be accessed beyond this plane of existence. At least, that’s how it seems to me.

I refuse the stupid reward/punishment paradigm. It sucks being on earth – for so many reasons. It’s also astounding to be on earth for so many reasons. I am reveling in how beautiful and varied this world is. I weep for what humanity has done when we had information and choices and ignored both.

As someone once said: humans are the only species that knowingly shits where it eats. That stands for pollution, over population, and all poor stewardship of our planet.

But, today, on my birthday eve, my mom is here. I am glad she is, even if it means I miss her human companionship. I want to talk to her. There are so many things I want to ask her – things that I cannot know without her input, and that is now lost forever. If I were psychic – or super psychic – I would be able to chit chat, and maybe get information that I want, but I can’t see her. I can’t hug her. I can’t be in her presence like I could before. Warranted or not, I felt comforted around my mom. I felt belonging. My oldest brother said that we’re orphans now, the day after my mother’s death.

I feel orphaned because all of the relatives that I loved and felt loved by are gone. My aunts and uncles are all gone, and me & my cousins’ generations are next on life’s conveyor belt. My mother was the youngest of eleven, but several of her siblings were still having children when she was too.

I am choosing to believe that my mom is surrounding me with love, wishing me a happy day tomorrow.

I miss and love you Mom.