#SOL16: Fictions

I.

Some truths are too stubborn, too unflappable for deception.  For example, I could never mistake my husband's body after death for the man he was before he took that last breath. Immediately after death, the body reveals itself as nothing more than a carrier of the most temporary sort.  What makes us human, vital, present is immediately gone and leaves behind an absence we cannot fill.  

II.

Some fictions though act as pleasant stories--ones we tell ourselves as we walk about in a day. Some mornings I walk and I imagine other ends for Rob, other alternatives, ones that are less traumatic, though no less final.

Instead of traveling to the hospital in the predawn morning of September 14--the very day my father, had he lived would have turned 98, we return to bed and refuse all treatments. We say no to the surgeon who only hours later will insert the infected port that marks the end to Rob's life.  In this new scenario, Rob lives for the next 6 months and we make the most of the time we have--time we never got to use due to the doctors, the infections, the mishaps, the carelessness, the surgeries, and the sad, sad collapse of our lives overnight.

In this revised version of Rob's life, the letter he told me he wanted to write his son, gets written.
The trip once more to Maine, gets taken. We lie down together, love sweetly. We see a movie.  We talk. He tells me where he put Dev's social security card.  We have time to say goodbye, to say all those things we thought were ours to give to one another.

In this scenario, Rob lives outside of the hospital bed. He does not spiral down.

III.

What acts best confirm your fictions?
What confirms the truths you most want to believe? 

#SOL16: Afternoon Interlude

What's on your Fridge? (2.2016)

I.

We're seated at my dining room table, when the woman from the care agency asks, "When was your husband's last bowel movement?"

A little more than 6 months ago such a question would have been unfathomable. Now it is nothing more than ordinary. This is what my life is like these days. Countless people from different agencies stream in and out of my home with fistfuls of paper that must be complete. They often inquire if I have a copy machine as the paperwork needs to be duplicated. They are caring, efficient, and very, truly sad for me.

I've grown too tired to laugh and oddly too numb to say much of anything. I mean what more is there to say after you have been told to display the DNR (Do Not Resuscitate) notice on the refrigerator.

"Where should it be?"
"You should have it openly displayed, like on your refrigerator. For the paramedics."

What paramedics? I think.

After the visitors are gone, I think about Rob and how he would have laughed at these invasions.  He always had a fondness for things that are irreverent.  Surely shit and resuscitation would fit that bill.

II.

I am sitting in the black recliner as I write this. I have pulled it alongside Rob's hospital bed. If I extend the chair, it's almost as if I were lying with him in bed. Almost, but not quite.  I laid that way yesterday for hours.

Mostly Rob spends the day elsewhere. He sleeps a lot and when he is awake he is almost certainly experiencing a reality that is not shared. In his world there are lots of buttons to be pushed, levers to trip, flying to be done, guns to be requested, water from Philadelphia to be drunk. Sometimes he's a British Lord.  Most times though he is lost and scared and wanting to move on, especially at night.

It's strange, I think, to not be able to anticipate that man you have been married to for so many years.