No, Mom didn't die last week.
    No detectable changes, in fact, to anything regarding her life, except that over the last week or so she's been up a bit more than usual; meaning, an hour or so each day. Her health profile continues to gently waft. Over this weekend she's experiencing some significant (for her) swelling which finally, yesterday, affected her ability to breathe, so I kicked in "a whiff" of furosemide last night to address this. It seems to be working. Her night-sleep has been noticeably more restful than her nap-sleep yesterday. I've been continuing to faithfully (and daily, despite having to occasionally make up a lost day, here and there) post over at The Dailies and Life After Death, so you can always keep up with just the facts, m'am, at those sites.
    I've been a bit, hmmm...the only word I can think of to describe it is "low", emotionally, though, for at least as long as the break between postings in this journal, which is why I haven't posted. I haven't been sure what to make of my mood. I've been overwhelmed by peculiar images every time I think about or meet someone, anyone, any age, in public or in representation. I suddenly see them aging into Ancienthood; what they'll look like, how they'll move, how they'll sound, how their attitudes and outlooks might change, how they'll die. It's a unbidden, unsettling experience. I've even been experiencing this with our cats and myself. Thus, I've been operating under a thin but, probably, noticeable veil of sorrow. I find myself leaking tears at the oddest of times.
    I think I'm probably doing some (more, as I've done a fair amount of this throughout the years of my companionship of my mother) advance grieving for what will be the absence of my mother in my life and, as well, the eventual absence of myself in this life. I seem to be expanding that grief into a generalized despair over the human condition. I'll be standing in a check-out line at the grocery and suddenly the clerk is thirty years older and the same amount more frail. I look around and my compatriots in line, no matter how young or old, have aged into their final years. I'll be watching a movie or television be stung by the awareness that everyone I'm watching on screen will be dead, one of these days, as I imagine them aging toward death.
    I haven't lost my sense that life gets better as one ages, even into my mother's category (assuming, of course, certain surprising and felicitous circumstances); and, yet, an overwhelming sense of loss clutches at my heart and any points I've ever considered in favor of the relentless birth to death cycle within which we're locked become illusory. Terms and phrases like "evolution", "renewal", "destruction into creation" lose their optimism and everything of which I'm conscious seems to be bubbling in a disinterested cauldron of death. My mother's interest in Touched by an Angel has not abated...we still watch at least one episode a day, if not more, at her request. You'd think this extremely hopeful series would pull me out of some of my mordant consideration but, instead, for a good 15 or 20 minutes after each episode I'm despondently muffled.
    This is why I haven't posted here, lately. I can't seem to move past this melancholy:

• Despite the fact that life continues, objectively, on a fairly even keel, here, even as the energy I put into observation of and tending to my mother increases bit by bit on a daily basis;
• Despite that I've been "engaged" in a stimulating conversation about songwriting with a long time cherished friend;
• Despite that I've developed an inordinate attachment to the movie Iron Man (who I also imagine on his death bed), which I finally purchased because I can't seem to get enough of it (my mother is not equally fascinated with this movie, but she is, so far, mercifully indulgent of my interest). I am a fan of super hero movies but don't usually collect them. The exception is my all time favorite super hero movie, Unbreakable, one which Mom enjoys; so my interest has resparked and I've been spent some time contemplating the super hero phenomenon, and yet...
• Despite the fact that Mom and I have become involved in an intense rifling through our "Really Old Movie Collection" (the ones that are 50 - 70 years old) and are immensely enjoying our viewings;
• Despite the fact that I am optimistic about the upcoming Presidential election, especially in light of the monstrous stroke of Democratic luck embodied in McCain's selection of Sarah Palin, and Colin Powell's endorsement of Obama and McCain's increasing dissolve into visible jitters as election day approaches. I've already voted and felt so confident about Obama winning that I decided it was safe to "vote the issues" and voted for an independent candidate as a statement of my stand on several issues that the Demo/Repub squaring hasn't bothered to address. At this point, I am so confident that Obama will win and this will be "a good thing" that I am in agreement with a panelist on the latest Real Time with Bill Maher, Matthew Dowd, that if Obama doesn't win it will be because another election has been stolen from the US electorate...although I think Obama's lead is so obvious, now, that any attempts to steal it will fail.

All this pales though, in the context of my mind's current insistence on autonomically, imaginatively aging and killing everyone with whom I have any kind of contact.
    Not fun.
    Later.
- posted by Gail Rae @ 11:38   email  this post