The Future

I am not shooting anything now, so I am having to dig back into old files to find things to post, but I only have certain files at my fingertips.  I will need to look into some other hard drives this weekend to get some variety.

I am neither shooting nor living which means I have nothing to write unless I go back into the memory files, too.  I must relearn to make partial memories into little vignettes.

Right now, though, my mother's sister is dying.  She has Alzheimer's disease but not so bad that she was totally uncontrollable.  It was difficult for her children.  She has had some surgeries for digestive problems and then she fell and broke her hip.  They were able to repair it without replacing it, but her insurance allowed her only so many days of hospital care, so they had to move her to a nursing home.  Never go to a nursing home unless there are ex-generals and senators and heads of corporations there.  The one they would put me in is a death house run by criminals and miscreants with teeny tiny I.Q.s.  The workers at the nursing home let her develop gigantic bed sores and at one point let her fall.

When she came home from the nursing home, she would cry out in pain all night long.  Everyone thought it was the Alzheimer's and the whole "Sundowners" thing.  It wasn't.  She lay for ten days until they noticed her thigh turning black.  When she went back to the doctor, he said she had dislocated her hip.  It had been so long that they couldn't put it back without surgery as the muscles had moved into the socket where the ball had vacated it.  After surgery, she had a heart attack.  They do not want to do anything else to her now.  I think there is not enough money in it.  But they are right.  She has no quality life left.  And so they have induced a semi-coma and are giving her no food or water.  It will take a while to die.

I love that Hospice takes care of dying people, but it seems barbarian just to let them die of hunger and thirst.  Just bump up the fucking chemicals and let her pass away.  Jesus Christ, it is a nightmare.

At least it has been for me.  I've had some bad nights lately and have woken from terrible nightmares that have had me pacing the floor with the lights on in the middle of the night.  They are not nightmares, really, just projections of my own certain demise.  My mother went over to see her sister.  She said she had wasted away, had tubes in her nose and mouth, head back, jaw slack, unaware and uncommunicative.  There is no dignity in that.  I have had visions.  I can see that end far too clearly, can see myself there, know the way I'll look.  And I am certain of one thing.  I will be alone.  There is both comfort and discomfort in that, but I think mostly of how and when to end it before it all boils down to that.  I guess we all do, but steps must be taken well beforehand, I know, for I've seen the impossibility of preparing for it after a certain point.  And nobody really wants to die, even those not terrified of death.  Just one more day, we think, just to see what happens.

It is difficult to think of a world without us for we have contained the world, its past and present and future, inside us for so long that surely it never went on without us to think about it, judge it, shape it in our own minuscule ways.  When we realize--truly in our bones--that it did and will. . . we walk the floor with the lights on in the middle of the night.

That is not what I intended this morning, and it is certainly not a partial memory woven into a pretty vignette.  But it is what I have right now, the world I've got.  That and the factory and uncertainty.

But a lens for the 8x10 camera came yesterday and I slouch ever closer to being able to use it.  I'm sure it will not be worth the trouble in the end, or at least that is what I thought this morning as I looked at the pieces and then the checkbook.  It is only a distraction, I know, something to do like carving wooden ducks or decorating furniture in sea shells.

I wish I could feel what the girl in the picture feels right now.  She has fallen in love for the first time, madly and deeply and stupidly.  I just want to know if it feels the same as it used to.  Surely it does, for the world has never existed without her.  She holds the past and present and future inside her now.  It is hers.