"Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything."
C.S. Lewis
Not feeling much like writing today, but figure that habit and discipline are important right now.
Last night Peg and I had the longest phone conversation I've ever had with Bobby in the three decades I've known him. He spoke rapidly, with many, many "uhs" in between his cascading thoughts. In the stream of description of how things were going at Baylor Hospital, where Mom was taken yesterday as a bedsore became gangrenous all the way to the bone, an occasional reference or word in the narrative caused me to look over at P in the darkness of the car hurtling down I-86 as we returned from supper. Her gaze in response told me all I needed to know.
"Palliative care."
"Hospice."
"An Art Line."
"Not eating."
All of this paints an incomplete but sufficiently grim picture that, with Peg's professional training to help read between the lines, I think I understand where we find ourselves. She's not going back to Hidden Springs. This is the last lap, although there's no real way to know whether that lap will be a couple days, weeks, or months. I will be there on Monday, a planned visit coinciding with picking up the Columbia from Van Bortel Aviation. Might that be too late?
Which leaves me in sort of a daze this morning. Right after Peg left I sat down with my iPad to read the paper with my bowl of granola, as I always do. Within a few minutes I was asleep, or fallen into something like sleep, a twilight illuminating a vivid dream. We were all together, all outside enjoying an early evening filled with the smell of petrichor. Peg's friend Scotty was there too for some reason, and he and I were picking on guitars while a much younger version of my boys played in the yard. Then I walked back into the house, and could see Katie through a cracked bathroom door helping Mom onto the toilet, as she'd done countless times before the move to assisted living. There was a trail of fecal spots on the carpet leading toward the glow of the bathroom light. In my dream, I tiptoed past the bathroom door to my bedroom, sat on the bed, and wailed like a newborn.
I awoke to an absolutely glorious day, inapposite to the reality unfolding in our world right now. Sunny with a high of 74. Maybe I'll get out in it at some point, a form of therapy that will at least interrupt this urge simply to sit and stare at the wall, processing it all. Work is a blessing at a time like this.
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