Pass On This One
I have been pretty successful (with some help) at distracting myself these last several weeks from the one year old imagery that is still crisply imprinted inside of me and which occasionally I will pull up and look at with pain and regret, knowing that such images fade but wondering at what point these will. There are some things for which intellectual preparation is both unavoidable and also a complete waste of time, for example knowing that my mother would die of some old age related disease did not prepare me for the specific circumstances of her death one year ago today.
I wrote that previous paragraph yesterday as the beginning of some imagined profound one year commemoration of my mother's passing. But the truth is, at this point, one year away, I am only grateful for the distance from the events that led up to her death and they are this--a thirteen year lonliness which began on the day of my father's death by cancer April 21, 1993. A "widow's hump" which made her seem strange to us, her six children adrift across the country ( I only speak for my siblings out of artistic license.), A day that began the end when in her early-eighties we took her car away and then more lonliness. Some years of it perhaps. A few years of discussion when it became obvious there was something to discuss regarding her well-being and then the giving of a name like Alzheimers or dementia and you can start the intellectual preparation. I love a good intellectual preparation. About a year after diagnosis we tricked her, I'm not being harsh it's just what we did, and took her on a trip to somewhere that was a facility we all felt very good about, but which to her was a prison imposed on her by the six of us. It was those thoughts she lived with for the next two weeks before dying. I honestly don't know what are the words on the death certificate or how accurate they may be.
I'll get a handle on this eventually, and this is me doing it.
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