I’ve not much to say today, but were I not blogging I would be brooding. Seriocomically, the hall I teach in at CMU is closed while they lay down some high voltage lines following a power outage, so even the genial distractions of ritualistic overpreparation aren’t available to me. My life is fortified with irony.
Right now it’s snowing, and the weather for the next three days consists entirely of 70-80% chances of 1-3 inches or so. As expressions of the pathetic fallacy go, that would be an epic win.
Right now I’m also sitting by the phone, waiting to hear news about my mother. According to my brother’s most recent report, she’s dying. He admittedly had the same news to pass along after her first surgery was completed last Wednesday, but the second surgery (to fix her shoulder) was attended by the sudden presentation of a high fever and breathlessness. The doctor assumes that she’s fighting off infections, that she might be bleeding internally, and that clots might be forming in her circulatory system, and my brother suggested that only medications and machines were keeping her alive. The remedies that a doctor might use under difference circumstances are not available in my mother’s case; she’s tiny, frail, and overmedicated already, and the blood thinners and antibiotics one might otherwise administer would probably be too much for her system to take.
On one hand I’m very fortunate; I’ve had the chance to say three goodbyes against the prospect of her passing, and that’s three more than most folks get. I wish, however, that she did not have to endure the pain that brought her to this pass, and I hope that she passes peacefully, so blissed out on morphine or whatever they might give her that she doesn’t feel a thing. A somewhat selfless part of me almost hopes that’s how it ends, because the idea of her curled up in her chair as she was when I visited last year, afraid to move lest she fall and hurt herself again, is not a life I would wish for her.
I suppose now’s the time for wishing, if only because there’s not much else I can do from this distance. Imagining what happens after–whether she recovers or not–awakens old and new anxieties, and thinking about the pragmatics and logistics riddles me with guilt. I’d elaborate if I knew how, but all the implications have been bubbling in my mind for awhile. It’s hard to fix on just one when a dozen others are jostling to take its place.
That’s just about where things stand. I’m not much for the confessional mode (unless of course I’m outraged or indignant, so no snickering), but today has turned into a game of minutes and inches. I’m hoping I can while away the one while my mother travels as many of the other as she can manage.
