Dress Rehearsal

For some reason day by day I keep looping back to exactly one year ago.  Some of this calendar-nostalgia is related to my poetry 'diary' which I've recently edited.  Of course hindsight is always a little interesting, especially when many of us had little but our own thoughts and sorrows to harken back to.  For anyone  that maintained an actual paper day-book,  thumbing through non-dogeared 2020 pages finds everything as it was written only... nothing fulfilled... as if an illness shipwrecked our lives and confined us each to an unpopulated island from where we wave weakly, unseen.  And despite the restoration of activity, we are not yet on the 'other shore' of safety... we hesitate to put our feet in celebratory waters, to toast one another with bare faces, to laugh publicly unmasked.  

For my ill friends, as I have mentioned many times, there is some consolation in knowing life as we knew it has not gone on without them... that their peers and neighbors have been limited and quarantined similarly... although they are suffering less.  I have grieved often-- for those I've lost, for moments which became more poignant... so much we took for granted.  Such are the lessons of life: we don't know how much we have until it is gone.  Illness is a major highlighter of experience.  I see my 'confined' friends panning through minutes for gold... reducing their wishes and dreams to a new 'smallness'... wistfully sighing over a coffee on a park bench... a walk by the river.  These things have become impossible... the way I used to long to simply see my mother with a cigarette on her telephone, twisting the cord with her beautiful fingers, critically admiring her manicure, her rings-- things she did unconsciously while she gossiped and whispered.

And still... the end of cancel culture for some is a kind of celebration.  A few friends are booking vacations, planning parties, buying concert tickets.  For me it's as though I've been through a kind of sieve, where all the extraneous things have been removed and I'm left with fewer needs, fewer complications.  The pared down version of life for me feels manageable-- simple.  I've come to terms with my needs and ambitions and they are noticeably less than they were one year ago.  There's a parallel between me and my two friends who are winding up the final yarn-ends of their life, who have let go possessions, dreams... and lie in the reality of a bed with a view-- some flowers, a meal... pain the only enemy they must resist, the symptoms of their illness a clingy companion-- a shadow.  Some days the sheets are clean and the nurses are kind.  Maybe I am too empathic-- the spongy, guilty/sad version of me who knows in a nano-second I could be the one in the bed; I have been there and often wonder why I was allowed the gift of time, and why, as Paul Simon said, I often spend it 'writing songs I can't believe' and failing to perform them.  

My intimate girlfriends are sad... they rely on my darkness, in a way. We don't judge one another, but accept our chronic sorrows like an illness. Some nights I lie awake and imagine losing the ability to speak, to write... I understand and absorb the slow rich hours of the sick when I visit my friend in hospice-- sometimes watching the clock hands circling, listening for hallway sounds... thinking about the elasticity of time-- how terror frames seconds and she often waits in the bright sunlight of pain for a simple cloud of relief to pass.  How she tolerates the intolerable and boredom is the coveted edge of a quiet sea at dusk. 

How they miss their mothers, these women who in a hospital bed are suddenly helpless children with no one to comfort and sense their fear.  For so long I have been my own mother... and I became, in a way, the mother/daughter for my own Mom when she was dying. There were times in her life when she spoke to me as a sister-- she confessed.  How she loved my father's smell... that's when she knew he was 'the one', though I find it hard to imagine she loved his 'old man' scent at the end.  Sitting in the hospital chair I wrote a note to my friend with a ballpoint pen and a pad I'd left her.  It somehow reminded me of the morning after parent-teacher night.  I'd picture my mother with her long legs sitting at my little desk, my handsome father with his hand on the chair... looking through my papers and projects.  We'd all do an annual self-portrait.  I asked my Mom to cut my hair because it seemed so much easier to draw yourself with bangs, and I wanted them to admire my work.  The morning after, my teachers always commented how handsome my Dad was... and I'd search my desk carefully for a note.. but there was none.  Every year I'd leave my little notebook open with a pencil... but they never took the hint.

When my son was a schoolboy I always left him a note; doubtful he read this or cared... such is life.  We try to anticipate pains and needs... but we misunderstand, we fail.  I do little to comfort my ill friends.  My worrying and telephoning are badly timed and useless. We do these things for ourselves, I think... we fluff pillows and fix blankets.  There was a Martin guitar in the chapel of the hospice... I suddenly craved playing something but shivered to think about the women and men who wander hospital hallways like a human jukebox trying to cheer the sick and dying who often roll their eyes and groan quietly.

I thought about the thousands of patients who had lain in this bed in the room of my friend... pandemic or cancer-- what difference did it make... I am still in the wake of grief-- of loss... in the shadow of 2020 in an unfamiliar forest of future where illness seems to be a kind of normal.  It does little good to watch someone drown and douse yourself with water in sympathy.  Some of my friends are nurses who have devoted months and months to saving people... and I don't know why I can't seem to find the thrust to move outward from this dark orbit.  

Years ago I read Susan Sontag's 'Illness as Metaphor'.  It is humiliating and dehumanizing to be a patient.  I fear this-- we all fear this, even those of us who are hypochondriacs and seem to wish for incapacity. But most of all it is a kind of rehearsal for death--  a foreshadowing, a preface.  I am not ready... who of us is? Besides, I've always hated rehearsing.  Still, like a kind of tinnitus the daily death logs and statistics ring in my head and haunt me.  It is death I am trying to come to terms with... and it is not yet possible.   I suppose life is the antidote; sympathy does not require suffering or guilt or sacrifice. We had Jesus to teach us these things, and you'd think I'd have learned some 2021 Easter lesson.  

Tonight the rising full moon was directly opposite a spectacular sunset behind the west-side skyline... like life and death... for once the sun and she had come to terms with the stage of sky... and it was only against the backdrop of utter darkness that the clarity really spoke.  Shine on, my Mom used to sing... all of those wonderful moon songs in her funny high voice that I can play back any time on the phonograph of my old heart. And it does, and it will-- in sickness and health, long after death do us part.