Old Woman's War

I took John Scalzi’s  Old Man’s War to Iceland with me. Yes, I’ve already read it 523 times (more or less). This vacation was to be about max chill-age – floating, gazing out at the breathtakingly gorgeous lava fields and getting lost in a good book. So I took a comfortable old friend.

The basic foundation of the tale is that you can sign up to go off to war, in outer space, at the ripe old age of 75. How in hell can old men and women effectively fight wars against anyone, let alone bigger, stronger, more tech advanced aliens? WHY would they even want to?

The promise of being made physically young again. You still have the accumulated knowledge and wisdom from a life lived but without all the nasty-ass feeble crap of a worn out bod.

Also too, adventure.

With those incredible incentives would I join up?

I began rereading the story while in the process of decompensation. That is, my body and brain began losing the fight with that fat, eggplant sized tumor in ma tête.
 
I honestly felt like I’d started my journey on the road to death. Not imminently and shit – I’d make it home to Ten and Coco – but I felt as though my final chapters were being written. Too fast they were being scribbled too.

My symptoms waned thanks to Doc P’s dexamethasone 'script.

You can see how reading OMW, with all this personal, physical shittiness goin’down, would get me thinking about what my choice might be.

A beloved character's spaceship was shot out of the sky. As she plummeted to her death she sent a final, lyric message to her friends.

Then Maggie turned, faced the planet that would kill her, and like the good professor of Eastern religions that she used to be, she composed jisei, the death poem, in the haiku form.

Do not mourn me, friends
I fall as a shooting star
Into the next life

She sent it and the last moments of her life to the rest of us, and then she died, hurtling brightly across the Temperance night sky.

She was my friend. Briefly, she was my lover. She was braver than I ever would have been in the moment of death. And I bet she was a hell of a shooting star.

This was one of my favorite moments of the book. So noble. So poetic and beautifully understated.

The haiku from my last moments of life? I feel pretty certain, it'd be more like this:

Fucking hell, shit, damn
Fuck, fuck, motherfucking HELL!
Did I feed the cat?

Again I ask, with those incredible incentives would I join up?

• If I could hear again,
• If my vision was wondrously perfect,
• If my brain could be tumor-free,
• If I could have endless energy,
• If I could fly off into space to explore new planets?

Tempting but prolly not. Ask me again when it’s a possibility.