SUCH AN END AS DESTINATION

  74 of #100daychallenge

If you are wondering if this is a weird day for me, the answer would be a resounding yes. I am not entirely sure what to even do. I have spent some time making plans here and there, but nothing is certain except that David and I are going to Salt Lake City in the next day or two. 

I didn't even know where to start. My other brother, Michael, suggested I find something out about probate in Utah. Wouldn't have even crossed my mind as I am more focussed on her kitty and her stuff. As I probably said yesterday, her kitty is fine and safe and being taken care of. 

Options for getting there are being sifted through as are options for Janet care. Or do we just take her with us? KH suggested we rent a nice SUV, I pick up David, and we drive there. Where is Anita's pink slip so that David can get her car? Lots of things to sift through. Does it make sense to go on Friday? And this just in, oil prices are rising. Just in the nick of time. 

I have to go pick up Janet in a hour, so if I am going to try to nap, I needs do it now.

How does it get to be 10:30 already?

I am just kind of numb and in "whaaaaaa?" mode. I did give myself a day to be rather lame brained and just marinate on the all of it. 

Anita was just a few years younger than I am. When she was very young, our families were closer. It seems I have never breathed in a world without her. It is hard not to get her texts or know that she is likely right there at the other end. It is heartbreaking that she died alone. I keep going back to "this can't be real." We still don't have an official cause of death. 

Michael did some research on probate in Utah and laid out some possibilities for moving forward. My sis-in-law Alicia got on the horn with her brother who is a lawyer, albeit in NY to make sure I would not be legally liable for paying for Anita's cremation. I guess her ashes just go to a pauper's grave. 

Not sure what is going to happen with Janet. Either she will come with us or Debee and John will come down to sit her. It is all so very strange. 

McCoy won't come in tonight.

Cats wrangled in. 

LEAVING

Were there such an end as destination

I could say that I was leaving,

could imagine friends gathered on the street below,

cheering maybe, waving maps tied to sticks.

But there isn’t. There is only expansion and contraction

like infinity, or a dime on the sidewalk,

like a letter I found in a corner of the empty room

I am moving out of, a letter I didn’t mail

that begins, “Dear S.—Guilt is the wound that never stops healing:

at time I want to look outside and see my daughter

standing beneath the ash tree and the stars,

a sparkler hissing blue and yellow in her two hands.

But the window is missing, lost,

lying in a field where someone passing

could look down into it and see the faces

rising up through the earth

and sinking back …. “A tiny well-formed cloud

I imagine I have inhaled the sky,

that I grow larger. I imagine that one day

I may grow large enough to fill my body.

T. Crunk, Living in the Resurrection, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1995