Journal: June 2013

Thea, now four, is having an existential crisis. She's been talking about death for weeks...during bike rides, on sunny days, making dinner, weeding the garden, taking a bath. James Gandolfini died she heard, from a sick heart I told her. What about the man with the sick heart she asks. And asks again. Why did he have a sick heart? Why did he die? 

She does not want to eat the fish grilling on the BBQ when she learns it has died, and must die to be eaten. We did not want to tell her this, but she asks. We are not at all prepared for the question, even if we didn't not want to lie. The fish doesn't want to die. Neither do trees she says, and I'll never cut down a tree. Weeds don't want to die either. Again, why did the man with the sick heart die, mom? I keep thinking about him. And what about you, mama? Are you going to die? What about me? Will I live a long time? Will I live a long long long long long long long long long long long time, mom? 

We all die, I tell her. We try not to, but we all die. It’s okay though because we're made of stardust and when we die we go back to being stardust. Our atoms and molecules become flowers and butterflies.

Why? 

Because we’ll get old, and our bodies can’t keep working. Or we get hurt badly, and our bodies can’t recover. 

Why? What about this fish? Did we kill him? Why? Why, mama, why? Why? Why? Why? 

I am harrowed, hearing these words in her sweet small voice: Die, die, dead, kill, die. 

Sometimes mothering this child makes me feel witless, weak, and ineloquent. 

But, like any parent out of their depth, I use the opportunity to push my own agenda. I talk about vegetables, water, sleep, and exercise. I talk about looking both ways before crossing the street. I talk about compassion and the dangers of greed. Finally, I say no matter what happens, I'll always love you. Forever. And ever and ever and ever. Even when I'm stardust. 

What if you die before me, mom? Then I'm damn lucky I want to tell her. But I say I WILL STILL LOVE YOU. I will never not love you. Stardust to stardust. I'll be the flowers in your yard, and I'll love you. I promise.

House of your dreams

In the kitchen of my old house on East Main street in Ashland, it is dark and colorless, fading to black at the edges...a cluttered dreadful mess, piles of sorrow and dark feelings. Molly is here, but there is no detectable human presence. I leave the house to do something about a name? Why a name? What do I have to fix? 

I return through the backyard, into the back door, down the hallway in deeply etched pen and ink darkness, fading in the surroundings like a comic-book vignette. 

I’ve come back to feed Molly because if I didn’t, no one would. She is old, with white on her muzzle and white wiry hairs in her soft black coat. She is bound to the house, and no one is there. I don’t know who the no-ones are, why they aren’t there or when they’ll be back if ever... as always… but in this past I am not bound to Molly. I simply love her.   

And she is so so happy to see me. In her excitement, she spills a bowl of something dark, flops on her back wiggles in the puddle. I try to clean her up.  

Despite the bleak sadness, it feels… static? gone? A significant place, intimidating, and intense, but the dust is gathering dust. It isn’t IN me, doesn’t get into me. Once, but not now, while still being ... awful?

Houses are common dream metaphors. Like curated sets of emotional states, evocative of what was and what it means now, familiar yet strange feelings overlaid on the geography of the past. For me, they are often dark and haunted, rotting floorboards, sadness, graying and heavy, cobwebbed. Sometimes they are places I’ve lived, often this house on East Main street. Sometimes they are places I could have lived, but the future didn’t pivot at the right moment. They have secret passageways and sometimes light, but more often darkness permeates, like sad in the wood grain. They are messy, complicated, poignant. They are not contained. Usually.  

Awake now, I lay in bed sweating and asserting myself onto the pillows. I could not get back by will or by feel into the house again, but I tried and tried because it all felt so unfinished. This house needs. Me. Something, tending, attention, but it is something ultimately not mine to fix or save, even if I want to. It’s too late for anything but compassion. 

To keep existing

It’s fucking raining outside. At the end of the hall, through double glass doors beyond an aching-green sloped lawn, the field is full of Canadian geese… the geese are not unusual, but the number of geese is extraordinary. It is cloud-dark: raining secondarily from the eves, a curtain of fat wet drops. 

We pause there at the end of the hall before entering the room on the left to talk to an old man in a hospital bed. He is growing small, with strands of fine white hair that look silky, tufted by his pillows into the vision of a nest for a delicate egg-shell skull. He is thin, his legs are bent, propped by pillows under the blankets. I don’t know why he’s here. I never know; even though I’ve probably heard him discussed in nurse reports and interdisciplinary team meetings, talked about by doctors and social workers and dietitians and all the fields of rehabilitative therapy, I don’t remember anything about him.  I remember stories, vaguely, and I remember their faces sometimes when we see them again, but I don’t remember how the stories and names and faces connect. And I don’t want to. 

But I’m only half committed to forgetting because half of my attention is consumed with a relentless melancholy all my own. I am both resentful of and resonant with their grief... 

He is upset, his wife is forgetting him, her children are giving themselves his things as if he’s already dead. It makes me sad about the way I barged into my dad’s house, put him into that hospice bed, and began pragmatically to throw his belongings into a dumpster, letting them clang against the metal sides and break at the bottom. I thought I was there to clean up a tragically broken plot line, but really, I was just an inconsiderate jerk. This man, laying here, would be powerless, were he not intruding on me.  

No one will help him. His wife is receding into her dementia, and her grown sons are dividing up his belongings because waiting for death is not efficient. No one cares. 

I think I remember him now, because he is so stuck in this grief. It's not just that no one cares... It's that he has told it, tells it, and tells it again, and STILL, no one cares. 

“Her son, 51 years old! and still living in his mom’s basement? he wouldn’t lift a finger to help me remodel or rebuild that house...” he says this time again, when I begin to remember...

He's turned away from us looking out the window into all that gray wetness. He looks our way sometimes, just to say HUH, WHAT DID YOU SAY WHAT?  never having heard us, he turns back to recount this indignity again. He smells bad, but only when you lean in close like I do to interpret repetitive questions performing a simulacrum of care with big doe eyes. Content doesn’t matter, it’s how you make them feel.  

They make me feel sad. 

The provision of care works through their projections onto us, our cultivated non-anxious presence. I try to remain as invisible as possible and not let their stories stay with me. But this grievance of loss and persistent injustice, this same story again, and again, the nagging sinking troubled diligence of fading away, feeling yourself evaporate while everything is being taken from you and nobody cares and nobody will do anything about it. Your power, your physical boundaries, your dignity, fuck even memories in your wife’s dementing mind, all being taken away.  

This is shit. This... all we want to do is live and if we do, we arrive at this. Stripped, feeble, broken. This is the reward for living. Love, even as it happens, is already a memory.  

Why are the things I don't believe so persistent?

Coming in from the cold, something deep inside of me hurts. Where have I been? 

I went out running. The ground is under me, but I’m still not there and don't know how to land. It's a feeling I hate... the sensation of being precisely un-coordinated from footfall turning over to footfall, that my beat is off one half a measure, only ever so slightly noticeable from the inside.

I ran slowly, listening to podcasts tell the same story over and over. I ran slowly and wondered what the big fuss was all about. I ran slowly, going through the motions responsibly like the experts who say, relentlessly, that you have to be running slow 80% of the time. So I run slowly, uninspired with just enough background noise to distract me from myself, my feet dumb blocks transferring impact up the biomechanical chain. I used to think this was magic, but that is no longer true.  

If it is, I can't remember. I don’t know what it is… what it’s been... maybe that I’ve become frail since I was last here on the ground, that it’ll hurt, tear, break, become misaligned from the under-activated muscles to the stress inflexible tendons, that they can’t do it. They’re de-conditioned. They’re not warm enough, not long enough, strong enough, young enough.  

I switch podcast to playlist, curve uphill following the road and kick up to tempo because fuck the experts. It's a long hill, and my heart is pounding all the way to the barrier of skin until I break away like a dream about running. The more I run, the more I become into running. And I remembered something. I felt it. I ran it down and let it devour me. It was spiritual. It was fucking holy. 

When the door closed behind me, I burst into tears and cried into my crumpled sweaty jacket. I cried myself to quiet extinction, until my eyelids pulsing bring me back to the contour of my body. When I move, it's hyper-real. I exist my way over to the shower, into clean clothes, into the routine of living. But I don't know what the fuck is going on? Who am I being, have I been, and what did I believe that got me here? Did I let it in or let it out? I don't know, but I think I'd forgotten something essential, and that the only way to remember is to chase it down with all the brutal will I can muster.

It's a squirrel's world, I just live in it

I’m always wanting to write about everything. About old men watching squirrels. About the squirrels in my back yard, about how they live in the hollowed out apple tree, how the apple tree has outlived all our predictions, continuing to exist gnarled and fruitful with sweet apples even though two of its few limbs are attached by little more vascularity than the underside strips of bark after falling to the ground. They have been propped on 4x4 posts for years now, and against all odds, are still alive.  

There never used to be squirrels in the back yard. Our family gathered around the tree living into all the space. We were unpredictable: the all of us, our child, her friends, our friends, the cousins, everyone's parents, some aunts and uncles, a few neighbors, two spirited and emotional dogs, and our bite-y scratchy cat... it was all too robust and excitable for a squirrel to risk.

So they never, ever came into our yard. They ran along the high wires and through the outer side yard, but only one time in a decade did I see a squirrel within the fence line, and it scrambled away frantically at the flick of my shadow. 

But now, Willie is gone, Owen is gone, Nevada soon will be gone, no one is loud or unpredictable, the cousins and friends have moved away... the backyard is quiet and empty.  

And squirrels aren't just unguarded; they have boldly taken the broken tree. They have moved in and started squirrel families; established squirrel communities; built squirrel churches; squirrel schools; squirrel infrastructure; and squirrel superhighways. For daring to sit in the backyard they scream relentlessly from treetop terminal limbs, fence lines, and roof tops, screaming until yes, fine, okay, okay, ok... we go inside.  

I don’t resent the backyard squirrels for moving into this vacuum. But if they are a sign of new life, it is not a sign of restoration. They are grass in the asphalt, one ecosystem giving way to another. Decay is not renewal.  

I only think about them this much because they keep the patients entertained. I hear it almost everyday.  Decaying in hospital beds or fluffed into wheelchairs, they sit staring out the window: I’m just watching the squirrels. they’re funny little things. There is no old folks home for squirrels, I think… no pillows, no pills... but from the the inside I’m not sure who’s got the better deal. 

This visit today, a man lays half turned to the tv, half toward the window. A prosthetic leg, with it’s sock liner stands near the sill. I see it and know he is a tall man. 

He says he is Polish and I think I recognize a unique eastern European phenotype... he looks so much like an old boyfriend of mine, but aged. Big but withered. Everything is great, he says, and recounts all the improving markers of health, says he is fighting like hell to get stronger because he has laid in bed for over a month and has become significantly de-conditioned... "so i'm fighting," he says, "except they also just told me I have cancer..." and he starts crying. 

He’s so much like my dad laying there, except my dad failed to thrive. He didn’t lose a leg in the war. He went AWOL and lived in the backwoods of New York harvesting ginseng until they hauled him back. And he didn’t fight like hell to become stronger. He didn’t fight like hell for anything. Instead, he became too weak to care for himself, to weak to walk, too weak to even sit up because he refused to work with PT. He had cancer and wanted everyone else to fight for him, to fix him as he lay there increasingly atrophied. 

This man looking at squirrels is not my dad. His crying is painful to witness only because he can’t do it. He can not do it. He can only fight it, barely holding off his voice pitched higher and higher. This man has probably never cried. None of them have. Not really. Not from the toes up until empty.  He can barely cry from the top of his throat.  

They always apologize, fight off the tears, and always manage to bring their rogue humanity back under control. I’m sympathetic, bigger internally than my boundary of professionalism. My heart aches.  

But suddenly he pivots to covid, becomes angry dismissing the fascism of masks and conspiracy of vaccines… pfft! He isn’t contemplating mortality now. Anger has completely defused this significant existential moment. That, I realize stupidly, is why they say anger is analgesic. Almost effortlessly, he escaped the same feelings destroying me. Is this the only way out of the mud sucking at my feet?  

My sympathy becomes listless, and again I’m reminded of my dad... it swirls all together in dispassionate tragedy: the company of squirrels, the fragility of men, oldness and brokenness, roused by fear and anger. I don’t have to sort it out. I just keep letting it pass through me, my hands barely not outpacing my brain, safely behind aloof professionalism. The things running around in my head, engaging with memories and evocative emotions, those are just the squirrels of consciousness... I don't have to own them. I don’t have to chase them away. They’re acting out a story, about my dad and his arc superimposed on this man, they put a wrist on the brow, they weep, they chatter and scatter... they’re just thoughts I observe and nothing more, just like the squirrels outside the window unbothered by the crumbling audience of old men and old dogs.

 

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 Hi mom 🔪