It's been a few weeks of poignance, sort of a low-level melancholy.
On Saturday we went to C's memorial service in WI. Sustained weepitude, but at least the service was fairly short and enlivened by the pastor, who combined earnestness with offhandedness in a bizarre way. I think about C a lot but perhaps haven't really come to terms that I'll never ever get to talk to him again. Today B found a postcard we bought in Chicago that we'd intended to mail to him and somehow never did: an assemble-it-yourself Chicago Tribune Building, and that moment of discovery was just somehow really really sad.
Other fraught moments: seeing his "to do" list still written on a blackboard in K's dining room; reading the heartbroken comments in his blog, more of them every week; seeing his cabin all cleaned up and museumified. It kinda made me a little upset to have all those people in there, picking up things and looking at them. There was another list - a cryptic sort of thing relating to files - out on the workspace, and the book of Stephen Foster songs we gave him at Christmas on the keyboard music rack.
B's uncle had a stroke a few days after we visited him. He can talk but apparently isn't very aware, and there's no possibility of going home, which is really sad. B's mom is having trouble focusing on the conversation at hand too, and there are threats of her having her motorized wheelchair taken away (for bad driving). Given how upset she was to be relocated to another room for recovery from her surgery, I can only imagine the despair she'll be in if she has to give up that chair.
For us it raised the philosophical issue of what agency the nursing home has for her: they say they are medically responsible to protect her even off home property (read: she can't get the chair back for offsite visits), but to what extent ought she to have autonomy to make her own decisions, even if they aren't the best? She's there as a free agent - but there's this whole grey area about diminished capacity and at what point they are medically obligated to step in. The cynic in me says they are most interested in protecting themselves from insurance or malpractice claims.
Then there are my parents: in their early 80s and looking to downside into a condo rather than some sort of retirement place. Their house has been on the market and even though they'd had serious offers, I'd lulled myself into thinking the sale was in the fuzzy future. Then we came home on Memorial Day and they informed us they'd signed a P&S and had to be out by the end of July.
It was like a punch in the stomach - thinking of how we'd never see the place again, and then how can they possibly clean out 60 years of stuff in 60 days? We had the "last" dinner in the dining room, the "last" night in the bedroom, the "last" walk around the backyard, and it was all very melancholy. (It is, however, documented in excruciating detail photographically.)
Maybe moments of passage are best illustrated by these little fragments. Funny: the social historian authors of the book I just finished on Williamsburg argue just the opposite: that fragments qua fragments can never add up to the full story, that the story MUST be constructed around the intent taken from, invested in, the fragments.
Posted by otto0114 at June 8, 2006 03:53 PM