Tag: family
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Elegy for a Heart Worn Smooth by the River
I knew my mother-in-law for twenty-eight years before she died this October of respiratory failure at 95 years old, presumably as a complication of the colon cancer surgery she’d undergone two days before. The procedure had taken twice as long as anticipated due to numerous unforeseen complexities. A tumor the size of a plum required…
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Getting Rowdy
Lost It’s been almost a year since we lost our much-loved boxer mutt Guinness, and I remember it with the chill clarity of today’s winter morning. We’d been keeping her kidney disease more or less under control for a long while by then, and though we weren’t measuring the remainder of her life in years…
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Some Random Thoughts at the Beginning of 2019
– This time two years ago I was curled in a chair with my laptop watching an angry sea in San Simeon. I planned to return this month, though according to the forecast the ocean would be placid and the skies blue. But a year of too much travel and a bout of post-Christmas illness…
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Driving the Future
A year and a half ago Tesla was not a car manufacturer that was particularly on my radar. I had heard of them, and vaguely remembered seeing Elon Musk in an Iron Man movie, and maybe that George Clooney owned one once, and that was about it. I only knew that they were starting to…
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The Inevitables
When I was younger (how did I get old enough to use that phrase?) virtually nothing felt inevitable. Not bad things like doctor’s appointments or my parents getting into yet another shouting match, and not good things like the beginning of summer vacation and Christmas. Reality might twist into some hitherto unknown shape and accommodate my will…
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Last Days
My mother’s end begins, as most bad things have these past six years, with a phone call. A series of them, actually. On Friday, May 25th, her private caregiver S. calls to tell me that she is mostly incoherent and largely unresponsive. On Saturday Anna, my mother’s favorite nurse at the skilled nursing facility, calls…
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Doing the Math
Once upon a time I was a software developer. Somewhere along the way I gave it up to pursue a passion for writing and a quieter life. But if you ask me now what I do, and if I were to answer honestly, I’d have to say, “I am the administrator of my mother’s death. And…
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Some Random Thoughts at the Beginning of the New Year
– I am snug in an ocean side room near Cambria. The rain that had been slanting sideways has dwindled to little more than a drizzle, and though the sea and the sky meet in a soft, unbroken expanse the seagulls are emerging from their huddles onshore and drifting past to remind me that I…
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Mother’s Days
It is the twenty-second of April, and this will be my mother’s fourth hospitalization since the sixteenth of February, trapped in a deadly cycle of infections acquired, beaten back, acquired again. I text my brother and call Stacey, a friend of my brother’s and a private caregiver who for over two years has dedicated herself…
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Some Random Thoughts at the End of the Year
– We haven’t had enough rain – not by a long shot – but what we’ve had has washed the oaks clean and they no longer look like treasured knick-knacks that an old, ailing lady hasn’t had the energy to dust. – The contractor who remodeled our kitchen built a snug little shed to replace…
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