How Things Are Right Now

He sometimes eats real food, sometimes doesn't.

Mostly surviving on cookies, juice and hard candies.  

Sleeping or in bed most of the day.  When awake he just sits in one of the wingbacks with the standard poodle sitting across from him in the other.

When I took care of his feet on Monday, I saw they were swollen.

(c) David Byrne, Talking Heads

His skin is dry and flaking.  He pics at it. Because he is sometimes very whiny about any changes to his body, I haven't been as nursy as I should have been.

He's incontinent, urine wise.  I have the pjs and jeans on a regular wash cycle.

When he talks, he sometimes makes sense, sometimes doesn't.

My greatest fear for him is that he will be frightened while I'm out of the house.  But Birdy is always there when I'm not, so she can comfort him.

I am listening to old New Wave music on SiriusXM First Wave in part because it takes me back to the first time I ever lived for real on my own -- Salt Lake City, 1984.

Caregiving Village

 There are people you want in your caregiving village, and those you don't want because they don't want to be there.  The people you want are those who can hear you, who can sit with you when you tell them of your grief.

The people you don't want are those who can't sit with your pain.  Those who want to dismiss it, to say things that help them not be involved, that help them not deal with their own mortality, their own chance of getting "it."  People who say things like, "Well, at least . . ." any fucking thing.  At least he's not . . .  Those are things the caregiver can say, but not a friend or supporter.  Not anyone on the outside of the journey. 

People on the outside of the journey don't know shit about the journey.  Their job is to support you, sit with you, or be outside the village.  Don't invest time in people outside the village, on people who can't walk with you part of the way on your pilgrimage to widowhood.

Ah, is it a village or a journey?  My metaphors as mixed up as I am.

It has been said by people misquoting John Gardner that there are only two plots: A person goes on a journey and a stranger comes to town.  I've been experiencing the interior version of both of those plots.  I've been on a journey of the heart as a stranger has entered my home: my relationship with my spouse.

Photo by Christian Stamati on Unsplash

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Is he dreaming?

 During all the time he spends in bed? 

What dreams may come?  Will there be a big transition or will it be more like slip-sliding away?  

He has slept almost twenty hours a day the past five days.  I think his speech centers are seriously effected now.  He's he's really mixing up words and losing them.  Sometimes I can't figure out what point he's trying to forcefully make.  And he waves his hands side to side, up and down, pushing out, pulling in.  I have no idea what these gestures, sometimes too forced, mean.