Boat Shopping With Charon

"That it will never come again is what makes life so sweet."

-Emily Dickinson

"Don't cry because it's over, smile because it happened."

-Dr. Seuss

6.13.23

A restless night, punctuated by someone lighting off fireworks at 11:36, then Slane demanding an open door at four a.m. for him to trot out for his predawn constitutional, then the alarm arriving as it always does at 5:30. Of course, I was awake anyway, pretty much all night.

And what was the cause? In part the usual, mental task lists compiled and emailed to myself in the darkness, reminders of the crush of deadlines and projects that have filled my waking hours for a quarter century.

But also this: the foreboding sense of things drawing to a close, maybe not today or tomorrow, but little by little all around us like rising water in the hull of a sinking ship. Peg's best friend left us four months ago. One of our best friends went from joking about his cancer to being the guest of honor at a memorial service only a couple weeks back. Another good friend of Peg's for over twenty years was diagnosed yesterday with an aggressive and incurable cancer. My own parents' slow slide into oblivion. It's hard not to take stock of where we are in life.

Yesterday's news carried a practical as well as emotional price. Mike's cattle have wandered the pastures at Wyldswood since a drought several years ago brought the herd inside our gates. We've watched calves being born, named a couple whose visage is unmistakable as we drive onto the property and past the west pasture--Regina Queen of Heaven, and Skeletor. They've been a part of the farm family for years now, and Mike's truck bumping across the grass to drop off a bale of hay or two has been a morning fixture when we take our coffee on the screen porch. But no more--Mike's going to be busy with his treatment, and texted Peg to see if we wanted the cattle because he couldn't keep them during this ordeal. But we're not there enough to take care of them, so they'll be headed elsewhere. We've likely laid eyes on them for the very last time.

So there's that. And George, the artist--builder who's breathed life back into the farm, like a nephew or little brother to Peg, is struggling with his ticker, has been in the hospital once already in the last few months if memory serves. And our event planners, a pioneering same-sex married couple bold enough to put down roots in Taylor County, appear to have split. P and I are starting to question whether the reincarnation of Wyldswood as an event venue is a viable venture with the folks whose talents made it possible fading out of the picture.

But what kept me up last night, more than anything, were thoughts of our own mortality as this world passes away around us. Not so much my demise; at the risk of sounding like a braggart or a fool, my old dread of death disappeared somewhere in the night skies over Iraq, confronted with the precariousness of my existence in a shower of antiaircraft fire. I can't say that'll be the case when the big diagnosis arrives--every warrior is a hero when he's stateside and death is an abstraction--but for now it doesn't register at a personal level, not at all.

P's life, which means our life, is another matter. She's feeling it, and I'm feeling it as well. Last night I couldn't shake the thought of what I would do if she were gone. Could I really rattle around this old house, or walk out to the fishpond at Wyldswood, without her next to me? Would I be consumed by grief, or catatonic, or create distractions through exercise and excessive time in the office? It is a scenario too painful to contemplate, yet one of us will get to take that ride, and my sense in watching our friends disappear one-by-one is that it's later than we think.

So, rather than tackling something head-on that's simply too big to manage, we spent yesterday evening sitting on the front porch watching the rain and shopping for a boat. We'd like to keep one on a Finger Lake, preferably Cayuga or maybe Seneca because they are connected by canals to the Great Loop. I found a lovely boat online up in Rochester, a thirty-six footer with generous staterooms, meticulously maintained for three decades by what the advertisement describes as an "elderly gentleman" now too infirm to enjoy this great love of his life, so he's letting her go.

The signs are all around. I'm not sure what to do with all of this.

Here's a thought, Donk: work! There's a hearing in an hour, an attorney phone conference in a nasty construction arbitration after lunch, and a long list of letters and memos and pleadings in need of drafting, emailed by some death-obsessed lunatic from his bed at 3 a.m.