…for more than a week. Sat, and read, often in what seems like dusklight, and immobile: books, blogs, email, old family memorabilia. Stacks of papers set aside “to do”, dusted with three months’ fluff. I have re-sorted the piles and replaced them where they sat.
Tried to catch up on those important things that have passed us by these last seven or eight weeks. No less to avoid the things that have since loomed large. But there comes a day when you’re exhausted by counting things lost, and stand in the shadow of the new insistent ones that have arrived. Time then to move on from reading.
One’s tendency when a chunk of life falls away is to approach the future as something that must be organized and planned. In this way we can postpone participating for some time, picking just the right step to take back into the present, and then realizing that it isn’t that present any more. Some folks refer to this as “healing”. I don’t know.
My wife’s mother died more than a week ago. I have read all I can stand about iatrogenic mortality, “institutional damage”, “defensive medicine”, and the like.
But I find I’m no better able to plan what to do.
Something, though. Just walking the dog might do. Something.
Not knowing the details, I had been checking your blog semi-occasionally and hoping for {good | better | comforting} news. My girlfriend lost her father, her second parent, very suddenly almost exactly a year ago — even today, thinking about it.… I don’t know.
You and your wife have been, and will continue to be, in my thoughts. Good luck.
“My wife’s mother died more than a week ago.”
I am sorry to read this, both for you and Barbara. It sometimes amazes me how estranged people are from brothers and sisters; if you were very close to your mother-in-law, that’s a gift too.
It’s waiting for all of us, but we’re all hoping that it’s going to be easy: we go to sleep and don’t wake up. The long slow expensive death in hospitals is a sad way to go … especially if one suspects that doctor error is involved (as you hint that it might be).
My heart goes out to you and Barbara.