Creative Writing Assignment

 I've been taking some memoir writing workshops. Below is a piece a turned in to Eileen Casey along with her feedback (in red).

 

photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

Prompt:  Write a ‘someday’ piece, imagining what it is you most crave is suddenly within reach. Find an object/detail which epitomises this ‘someday’ feeling. How would you react?

 

“Always look on the bright side of death:
Adjust before you draw your terminal breath.” --  Eric Idle

 

I am waiting for the Reaper, that slacker!  Sometimes I picture him as Bengt Ekerot, the white-faced actor in Ingmar Bergman’s Seventh Seal.  More often, I see Death as the John Cleese-voiced puppet in The Meaning of Life:  the Grim Reaper with his pointing skeletal hand.   And I yell at his black-robed, scythe-clutching figure, while tapping my Shinola watch:  “What the fuck!” LOVELY...GREAT VIBRANT OPENING. I'M 'IN'....

He’s late, you see.  Going on six months now.  In December of last year my spouse was accepted into a local for-profit hospice.  In order to get federal funding, they needed to claim he had only six months to live. So now Mr. Death is late for his very important date.  And I’m ready for him. 

I’ve been ready for him since the mid-Nineties, when I volunteered with a non-profit Hospice. For two years I was part of care teams that included a nurse, chaplain, social worker and family members.  Though most of my clients lived only a short time after our teams were involved, my last continued on for six months.  Joe, like my spouse, matured past his hospice sell-by date.

Because of my work duties, I was unable to be with Joe during his last hour.  But as soon as I could leave the college when I was giving a test,  I jumped into my Toyota Corolla and sped across town to Deschutes River Woods.  When I got to the mobile home he shared with his wife, I found the Hospice nurse in Joe’s bedroom.  His old body was completely naked. 

“I just got him undressed.  Would you like to help me wash him?”

The body was thin with knobbly joints.  The skin was very soft, except for on his fingers, rutted from decades of guitar playing. ABSOLUTELY GORGEOUS DETAIL He was almost hairless.  As I passed the washcloth over him, I felt his body temperature slowly changing from warm to cool.  Soon rigor would set in but as the nurse and I cleaned the corpse, the joints were still easy to move. 

I wondered if this is what my own husband would look like when he died, though at the time he was only sixty-four.  He is now ninety-one.  Ninety-one going on three.  He has late-stage vascular dementia.

So I am prepared and will use my past experience when the Grim Reaper arrives.  While I know that widow-hood will be hard after a fifty-year partnership, I believe that what we’re currently going through now is harder. 

Well, what I’m going through. 

My sweetheart seems perfectly content.  He is a hummingbird,  living on the sugar in hard candy and clear Ensure.  I don’t think he knows what he’s lost or what we’ve lost together.  He doesn’t wake up and go to sleep with grief.  He probably doesn’t think about what it’s like for me to wipe shit off legs I used to kiss.  He sleeps much of his day.

And I look ahead to the beginning of my freedom.  Look ahead to the horrible morning when I wake up beside a cooling body, smelling the final release of fluids in our bed, a smell I already know.  When I will cry for an hour or two and then wash his body myself, touching with love the great bones that are now barely contained within the fragile skin.  When I will call the Hospice, the Funeral Home, and my Priest.  When I will finally have no one to take care of but myself.

HI Kake, I have to say. This IS among the best pieces I've ever received in all my time on this course. Honestly, I wish this piece were mine, it's excellent. You really won't have any problem publishing Kake, once you decide on what type of book you want to write to full fruition....diary of this time recounted here? I mean I don't need to tell YOU, when you have this much talent, this much courage and inner nous, knowing how to pace, where to take me in the emotional sense, honestly? This piece is of the standard I don't see too often. I can't fault it and in a way I wish I could. For now, I'm a very keen reader of your work, Eileen