The Day Death Became My Mother

Fall is cold in Portland. Cold in a sorrowful, penetrating way. And my decision to spend three days in the close company of a dying woman is made to seem all the bleaker what with the powdery gun metal gray of midmorning downtown. I am standing naked in my brightly painted and meticulously organized apartment, indecisively staring into the gaping mouth of my open closet. How does one dress to meet with death? Commencing with the dispassionate announcement of my morning alarm, I contemplate one question: why did I agree to do this?
Marco’s mother is dying. And as a friend of both Marco and his waning parent, I am obliged to assist her in a sort of last wish: transcribe her handwritten book into type.
I leave my home with little more than my journal and a blank expression. I feel in all ways unremarkable. This service to Marco’s mother will give me a sense of temporary purpose, I hear my own voice trudging through my mind with pallid encouragements. Driving out of the city I do not turn on the stereo. I cannot be interrupted. I am pondering.
Pondering car accidents, knifings, floods, poisonings, and suffocation at 35,000 feet. I do not want any of those things to happen to me. I seize a bit at the thought of bearing some sort of hurting until I finally passed away and what that change would be like. Perhaps all of the discomfort would just stop abruptly and I would be left floating without a body in the middle of inky, intangible blackness.
I arrive at Marco’s mother’s apartment several miles outside of downtown. Her name is Megan. She is dying. Megan is dying. From cancer. It’s so typical. So anticipated. The common nature of the ailment almost makes it harder not to fear. It seems so well known and yet indomitable.
I lightly knock on the door with the bronze 44 just beneath the convex glass bud of the peep hole. Megan’s in-home caretaker lets me in, ushering me to her bedside. And then began the change within me.

You never know just how you’re going to feel when you get close enough to touch someone who’s dying. Will they be cold? Will they be angry? Will you get some kind of infection? The truth I realize more and more every day is that for as much as we live in a time that pretends to know death, we’re really only ever hearing or talking about the events that lead to and/or cause death, as opposed to the morbid concept of a body losing life. Becoming exanimate. Like toothpaste being squeezed from all sides at once. Or a sponge being wrung out.

It’s the second day. Megan seems to be quite empty. But it appears as if all she’s really lost is some of the water that makes up her physical body. Her ruminations and intimations seem to come out of her like majestic lions and cunning tigers slinking out of a dark stone cave. Her cold, unresponsive exterior belies a strong, radiant product. Her eyes are all stone and lassitude. And yet she’s not miserable. She’s irreversibly moving towards death and she is the essence of peace. As I sit across the room typing page after page of tidy scrawl I am again pondering.
Pondering where Megan’s consciousness will go after she dies, whether or not there will be consciousness after death, and why I am so terrified of not knowing.

We’re taught in countless forums that death is some sort of pain, or at least painful. And that immediately makes it frightening. And even when we decide not to run from our fears, when we decide to turn and truly face them, it doesn’t always mean that they will make some kind of analytical sense. Like we’ll burst some sort of psychological pimple and forever be drained of the purulency of impending doom. That kind of catharsis would only bring about unimaginable hubris in everyone anyway. Immortality seems to breed pig-headedness. Just look at the Greek gods. Life becomes a thing of sport. A bet to be levied in a grand yet ultimately pointless wager.

Day three. I am still typing. Megan is still dying. I finish entering the last line of text and note that I have considered and reconsidered everything I can grasp about my wary review of death. I go to Megan’s bedside to tell her I am finished. She raises her wavering head and the skin around her eyes seems too tired to show emotion. Her cheeks display small, spidery purple bruises from the weak blood vessels burst beneath the indent of the oxygen hose stretched ear to ear across her face like a bandit’s mask. She beckons me in to where she can whisper next to my ear. Nobody can ever be ready, honey, she says. How can they be ready for something they don’t know? she asks somewhat vacantly. I suddenly see the that the enemy is not death, but knowledge.

With the inflation in popularity over the years of such societal focal points as mass-provided news, crime and medical dramas, and vapid, materialistic “reality television” we are given a ridiculously polar outlook on death and life. While evening news broadcasts, the newest iteration of serial murder, and bedside heartbreak provide the communal imagination with innumerable examples of the menace of oncoming passing, faux-candid scenes of richness, glamor, and meaningless sensory stimulation create a paradise of insouciance. And with a dark rain cloud on the horizon of a shallow paradise, it’s anyone’s guess how much rain it will take to drown us all.

Instead we reach inside each other through the shroud of alcohol, the fog of narcotics, and the clumsiness of sex to feel something, anything permanent. The truth as it always has stood is that death is the one constant life has to offer. And as such we ought not place an undue focus on what little we know and how much that knowledge terrifies. Instead I elect to embrace its mystery as a comfort, as an assurance in its definite quality.

And with that I am safe. Safe from this myth of death because I will not pretend to know. Only to ponder.

The whole story

When I sit down with little more than a comforter for clothing and not so much as one cup of coffee in me I'm sure I've gotten to a point very near rock bottom.
I've felt gray and deflated so much of late that all I currently see around me seems just as drab and weak as me.

But I am not drab. Nor am I weak.
I just seem to be having the hardest time stepping away from the comforts of their disappointment.

What happened to being endless, without boundary, without limitation?
Where is all of my once whipped-cream luxury of boundless potential?
Everything felt so light and sweet and yet rich and sybaritic.
And now I have nothing more than a plastic tray with some dried out hashbrowns and a meager clump of sandy scrambled eggs.

I feel sometimes like Meg Murry. Like I have all of this older siblinghood that I don't really know what to do with and yet I want so badly to rise to the occasion and become what everyone wants of me. Nay, become more.
I want to outdo even myself and not just their expectations.

But I have no energy for such an undertaking.

Last Night I Dreamt

I was standing with my mother on some sort of vacation and we watched a big, bland-looking white-painted concrete apartment tower come crashing to the ground.

The moon ducked behind the horizon just before the dust cloud punched into the sky accompanied by the rolling and thunderous explosion of air and plaster. It was as if some giant hand had squeezed all of the life out of a giant plastic bag. Only this plastic bag was full of people and furniture and television sets.

We ran to escape the falling debris but doubled back to make sure the Camry was alright. Our priority was to check on our vehicle.
There is something so terribly wrong with this idea.

Another Bout of Melancholy

Why is it that everything I once took any kind of joy in has suddenly wilted like a maple leaf fallen into a muddy puddle?

I know I'm pathetic and yet in my realization of this I see how truly and deplorably pathetic everything and everyone else actually is. We're all stuck in a giant eddy. We're swilling our filth and murky attempts at clarity around one another in some sort of go nowhere carousel of self-delusion and feigned completeness.

As creature of habit we all look for the cause and effect of things.
We want to know why.
And it's only in the last several hundred years that we've been provided with the one fatal element that undoes our natural sense of curiosity: convenience.

Everything we engage in must be constantly examined and reexamined in order to come up with some method or some device useful in making said engagement easier, more convenient. And in this pursuit we eschew out typical ingenuity and readily available imagination in trade for effortlessness.
When once our work was what documented our embracing life, our art being the legacy of our being, we are now faced with an age of abbreviated conversation sent in textual chunks; a society predicating efficiency over quality; a general attitude of spite toward the notion of patience and its inherent value in building an appreciation for life and its cycle.

And I am through with it.
I realize the hypocrisy intrinsic to such a claim made from the standpoint of an individual just as saturated with the need for ease as all of the surroundings he finds so needful of critique. And there lies my weighty and inward combustion. My systems of engagement are breaking down and my will to continue along with them.
I am finding myself without any reserves where hope and optimism are concerned.
And this is a difficult place to be in the same sense as any addict finds her or himself experiencing the keenest of loneliness when they finally are departed from their vice. I am unfamiliar with a life with convenience and yet I am so desperate to find out what that means, how that tastes, the way in which I will rest when finally without it.

This would seem appropriate basis for my recently inflating desire to vacate my present life; to leave the makeshift home I've concocted from so many clashing parts; to run far, far away from the network in which I find myself snared like a spider's prey. Only this spider is one of selfishness, of pride, of conquest and recognition, fame and celebration. But only of me. And nothing of the beautiful and majestic World in which we all forget we live.

Because the World is not convenient by nature. The World is determined and productive. At its own, ethereal pace. And who are we, puny humans, to try and impress upon the preexisting world some semblance of control?
Even if you blithely follow some Messianic faux-historic poetry about 7 days of creation, humanity still came last. And yet somehow we've all come to blindly forget this.

We're not the top of the totem. In fact the notion of hierarchy is just the thing killing us all. And by our own hands. What is this need for superiority? What does it actually accomplish? Survival? Social betterment? Equality?

By no means.

All the quest for superiority accomplishes is so much discord, conflict, and devaluing. The wake of destruction left by a militant effort toward establishing oneself or one's group as better or even best has always been and always shall be of no benefit to any but the sole interest of the would-be victors.
And as the victors soak in the glory of their dominance, the World around them retreats into decay and the kingdom the victors once so arrogantly reveled in will slowly and quietly wilt into a wasteland where no ones proliferation will seem worthwhile.

And this is where I have found myself.

I can't find my envelope of Au Pair paperwork.
I can't find my wine key.
Life is eating my opportunities and calm.

I'm terribly unhappy.

Disjoin

I am scattered and disparate.
There is little to me other than lacking order.
I feel lost in my own bits and pieces.

And when I try to collect them up and reassemble their once confident wholeness
I grown more and more lethargic with each found morsel
and eventually just drop them all over again out of sheer ambivalence.

It's as if I'm allergic to my own completion.

Well,
It's here.
Again.

That hovering, haunting presence.
Dark and dreary.
Sorrowful and full of sticky persistence.

I'm careening into chaotic flustering pandemonium.
And the tragedy is that I seem so well put together on the outside.
That's just the cleverness of me.

I'm miserable a little bit.
There seems to be no end in sight.
The gray clouds blind my view of the horizon.

And what I wish I was doing,
the reading, the writing, the making,
is a hopeless set of now daunting incompletes.

I am so angry on the inside.
I want to break everything and then go to sleep.
And have it all be put back together when I wake up.

But it's when my eyes are closed that everything falls apart.
And the juices in my stomach begin to churn.
I am sick with the fevered tedium of a crippled explorer.

Because I felt the need to collapse

No one really knows much, really.
Although a lot of people pretend.
They pretend very hard.
But it tends to be those who pretend the hardest who know the least.
And it tends to the ones who know the least who pain me the most.

This son also rises

I am awake.
I am feeling a tad unhappy.
But I am not tired.
And I am not disparaging.

Last night I fell asleep to the sounds of my boyfriend's thoughts.
Today I greet a welcome silence in this cool morning air.
The sun filters through nothing as it enters my room and the walls beg for an echo.
And I hold my own counsel.

For boredom I hold unwavering contempt.

When the cold rolls in

We've entered that time of year where sheer chills drive me back to the keyboard.
At least I know I'll be writing with some consistency.

Having awoken to yet another morning punctuated by the silent cries of my ailing back I must admit I grew somewhat despondent upon finally exiting the bed. The mere fact that being in an annoyingly persistent discomfort disallowed my getting up prior to noon causes me no small sense of frustration.
I feel like I'm wasting my life. Or rather the pain in my back is wasting my life.
I'm missing something important. Like seeing a child on a leash waving at an ambulance with a smile on their bewildered little cheeks. Or seeing a dog trotting aimlessly down the sidewalk with a tagless collar and no one walking beside them. Or feeling the bite of a bright cool as the Sun shines through the filter of invisible ice.

Instead I wallow in shame and anger as I feel subject to something inside me that I can't control.

And while I feel the love of those around me who empathize, sympathize, and moralize, I'm still left to my own emptiness once their cheers die out.

If only I could harness this angst and channel its power into something like a novel or screenplay. Or perhaps pursue acting in a real way. Or something. Anything.

At least I'm writing now. It is oddly satisfying. Almost drug-like. If only there was some sort of narcotic that would permit me to feel successful. Hopeful even.

And here I sit listing this objects I've misplaced of late. My favorite tank top (although I'm pretty sure I know where that is), my pages of typed (and unsaved) writing, my keys, and finally, my sense of purpose.

It's 5am and I am a slave to the ceiling fan.
The hypnotic flinging blades jilt my unblinking eyes.
I'm tortured by their indomitability.
Listless and motionless I lay victim to their taunting chill.

When the lights go out I am still aware of it.
The spinning.
If only I had such redundant purpose.
Such collected poise.
Instead I am abandoned to the thankless spots of used sheets.
Still and searching.

And still searching.

There he rode

Cycling over the interstate with a definite purpose, Janvier lifter his flaming hand.
The left palm and digits sparked and danced with the blue flame of peace.
The colorless color of dark before light.

He looked down at the myriad cars sailing beneath him in their predestined routes, guided by so much concrete and yellow paint. He pedaled with only half an effort. No one was going that fast. And he was more interested in studying them as a whole as opposed to scrutinizing every vehicle.

The blue flame stayed strong and icy, like a frosted wave.

Les Nuages

There are moment when I feel free.
I listen to music with an inherent sense of hope.
A liquid optimism.
More than joy.
More.

And in my flight
I am still weightless
though the winds pull
and worry

I do not worry.

Where can I go
without the gravity of home;
without the angst of an unknown tomorrow;
without a sliver of fear
to pepper the love.

Where can I go to worry?