Mary, don't you weep

 

I've had insomnia the last few nights. Waking up at 3 am and barely getting back to sleep before 6 leads to me doing weird things to get sleepy enough to fall back asleep. I put on some Kingston Trio, and it led me to have dreams with a weird melancholy soundtrack.

I'm not sure how Gina, my wife's hospice nurse figured in, but she was there in spirit, encouraging and exhorting me to the tune of "Mary, Don't You Weep." I was in some kind of post-zombie apocalypse world. That's a world so desolate that even the zombies have vacated. I was the lone survivor, left to roam the empty landscape with no purpose.

That's all I remember, but it leads me to my thought for the day: I am somehow still alive. I am still doing the things I remember to do, trappings of my previous life, although it doesn't seem to matter. I shave my face and head, to look tidy for who? I pick out my shirts and clothes to wear, as if there was someone who might notice or care. 

But most days no other human beings even see me. The dog, cats and guinea hens could care less what I look like. I do my housekeeping routine to keep up a level of human dignity, but none of it makes me any more human. I'm just a shell, going through the motions. TV programs and other distractions provide me with just enough mental stimulation to keep my brain from eating itself from starvation.

It's tough being the survivor when there's no reason for living. No battles left to fight, no one to impress, just me and my compromised integrity. Who am I kidding? Who am I even writing down this meaningless, meandering soliloquy for?