THE SCAFFOLDS DROP

So, sitting here on a very very early barely Valentine’s rainy night. It’s 12:47 a.m. and I should be going to bed. But I am not. I am thinking about the blog I just posted, the Anne Sexton poem, the sadness of close friends. About my mom’s fragility and increasing spaciness and disorientation. We did two yoga classes this week and that ought to be some sort of occasion to be grateful. I suppose that factors in to my overall feelings, but you know you can count on me to not be too positive.

I didn't even write a few weeks back about the parent of another close friend passing. In some ways, I was even more involved in that passage. K was here from Albany. I was fortunate enough to be available to be some sort of fail-safe/down comforter when the hospital, and the family, and the waiting were too oppressive. K was very very close to her father and he was a still a central, daily part of her life.

We were meeting for dinner after several extra hard days for her, moving him home from the hospital, the family decision he was part of to go into hospice. Knowing that this would be the last time she would be called to fly across the country to be at his side. K had been up, next to her father most of the previous night as he had called out for her.  She said he was dancing with the dragon.

As I pulled up, K was on her phone talking to her brother who had recently shown up to relieve her. R, her brother, had said that her father had just stopped breathing. The call was a little confusing as K had been gone from the room for all of two minutes. Exhausted, really not able to do anything else, she decided we needed to go eat.

By the time we were seated at the (swank) restaurant, he had passed. K was in various layers of sorrow, relief, confusion, exhaustion, and damn hungry. How do you respond to a cheery waitress who, upon seating you, chirps "And how are you this evening?" Hmm ... not really fair to be honest, glib, or sarcastic (rather our three favorite modes most of the time). I can't even recall how K responded at that moment, but she and I probably looked at one another and laughed (we do that a lot anyway). Eventually, we told the waitress in as kind a fashion as we could. 

We didn't drink a lot, although we did have some Manhattans in his honor. The drink was great, the food was good, the music was enough to kill us. I suppose the evening could not have been but odd. Some kind of strange aura around us as we both processed this inevitability and life. The music was really bad.

So, even before Ger took a down turn, there was this loss to kick off the year. And in the past weeks, two or three parents had strokes. I almost took Janet to the hospital last week for high blood pressure. Her doctor told her that she had to exercise and watch her eating or she would be having dialysis three times a week. That seemed to motivate her a bit.

Now, I have explained a bit better, I can try for that sleep thing. I slept ten hours last night. Janet slept 14. That does not afford either of us a productive day.

The Props assist the House

Until the House is built

And then the Props withdraw

And adequate, erect,

The House support itself

And cease to recollect

The Auger and the Carpenter—

Just such a retrospect

Hath the perfected Life—

A past of Plank and Nail

And slowness—then the Scaffolds drop

Affirming it a Soul.

— Emily Dickinson