There's a sense in my mind that things are already over and we're waiting for gravity to pull us all down the drain. This sense must be scrutinized because it may not be true. Can anything be true if everything is just a story?
My mother's mind has been declining for a very long time now. It's hard to pinpoint when, but something in her stopped working a long time ago. She's not the type of person to complain or seek help or tell anyone her problems.
My father's mind is slowly declining as well, and he lets everyone know every single step of the way. The entire time I've known him, he informs my mother or any family around him what his physical ailments are.
I don't know who I am at this moment as I type these words. I've spent the past several months preparing them for a move from my childhood house to their retirement home. Now I'm helping prepare them for a move out of my childhood state and up to another place. I'll spare the details at this time except that I know this is the end of a chapter.
I don't know how many more chapters I have because I've always defined much of my life in terms of my relationship to my parents. I stayed in Virginia to be close to them, and now they're going away.
I'm estranged from two of the three children I fathered, and I have severe doubts I'll ever see them again. I won't go over that again now, but I'm no longer hopeful I will have anything to do with them. To assert what I want would be seen as an attack, when all I want is to be able to speak with them and be in their lives and encourage them.
And now I won't have any family in Virginia, and I don't know if I will stay here. I had really hoped my dad would have laid down roots for others. I had hoped to buy the childhood home. I had hoped I might get to talk to my American children about their grandparents' health, but I am excluded from that story.
So as I type this, I am not sure what will happen. I feel fundamentally tired and rundown and bewildered and useless and sad and depressed and torn apart. I've put myself back together again so many times, but how much longer can I do that?
In a moment I'll go to the car outside the retirement community on a busy road that cuts through a former field in a new town center. I've slept her for much of the last month and haven't written out all of the milestones in any significant way.
That will come as I have so much to write, and I have found it hard to write in a place where the bulletins come so frequently, in a house where a month ago we struggled so much and some of us hoped that maybe my mother's declining health was caused by something else other than being taken from her home.
I think about the time I have left and how much I want to accomplish before my end comes and how I don't want that end to come prematurely. I want to speak to my two American children again, and tell them how much I love them and how much I miss them, but to do so will be seen as an attack.
I don't want to attack anyone. I just want to live my life and be useful and try to connect people and to try to do something to stop this feeling that we're circling around a drain, humanity's potential wiped out due to the selfishness of those at the top.
I think about how much I want to write a song that someone might like to hear, and then realize maybe no one ever will and that one day I'll just fade away into nothingness, increasingly drowned out by the babble all around us.
And yet I come to the end of this entry and find myself calmed a little by what I've taken a few moments to do.
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