Today I finished my newsletter, the one I do on Sundays in order to let people know what's going on in my community. I wrote the easy parts yesterday and the harder parts today.
I don't think my dad would want that.
I don't remember it. I'm not at home but I'll be on a train in just over eight hours to move from Pennsylvania and Virginia. And in about a week I'll be prepping to come back up here to spend another week.
Or will I?
I do not know at the moment. I'm not in control of this time at this moment. For the past nine days I've been in other peoples' lives while also being in my own. It just so happened that from July 25 until now I've been up here. I'd like to stay because I want to be near my father.
I think in a way I also want to be here for my sister. She needs help and I can feel this so much. I'm here to help because we're at that point where it's about comfort for my dad and not about trying to fix anything. There's nothing to fix. His body is shutting down. Systems that worked automatically don't work anymore. If he was a wild animal, he'd be dead by now.
And that's the thing: He's a human being who lived a full life and the knowledge he won't ever leave that bed again is quite difficult. We are in a new era and we're not going back to the old one. We're in a time when my parents' lives end and the arrangement of my personal solar system is in flux.
This moment is not one I can write about. My Uber shows up in seven hours and there's no way I can sleep. It's odd to think I'll be home in 14 hours. It's odd to think that there's a system in place that deals with all of this stuff. It's odd to think that when I am finally in a room together....
No.
Is it happening to me, too?
I am a person who knows at the very end I will be unable to put the pieces together. What came for my father and what comes for all of us is coming for me. None of us last forever and I seem to have been motivated by that fact for most of my life.
With mixed results.
But today I made an odd mistake of telling my dad the work I was doing at that moment.
"I'm writing a preview of the Board of Supervisors meeting in Halifax County," I said.
In the past week I've told my dad as little as possible about my life. Gosh, they've never really been interested unless they can make fun of me.
But tonight after I told my dad I was talking about doing work back in Virginia, it triggered something. He kept asking what county was next to Halifax County and I told him that the one to the east had a similar one to the state where he now lives.
Pittsylvania County is the one.
My father's condition is such that he cannot comprehend the idea of a right answer. He's living in a loop and his mental decline is of a different type of my mother's. My mother's underlying health is quite different. Her condition seems to be only of the brain.
My dad's condition is in the nerves. And that's more total. The mechanism of his body is shutting down and there's no way out of it. My mother's is solely contained to the brain.
Maybe mine is both? And maybe it's always been that way.
We are alive. Well, I am, And I've done all I can to document.
Today I told my dad about Halifax County and for a full 45 minutes he got stuck in a loop about the geography of it all. He's not who he was in the past but yet he is everyone he always was in the past, pasts I can remember. He wanted to explain something to me but he wasn't making sense. He was talking in a dream.
With seven hours to go before I have to catch that train, I have to wake up and go back to my life. If only for a week. Part of me hopes I miss it and I end up staying here.
I don't think my dad would want that.
So I will catch that train. And in about 13 hours from now I will be home.
If I make the train. Does it go to Halifax County?
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