Time and To-Dos

a spoonful of actuality to help the mortality go down

It’s Tuesday.

Twenty-one days since she died now, my Mother, and the lump in my chest is beginning to melt as the to-dos get checked and checked and checked.

Funny how death itself is so immortal. Stowing away in the creases of forever that string life itself together.

Everyone in the family is responding quite differently. I myself am surprised by my own physiological responses. How the frustration bubbles up, when it comes out as a pout or as exhaustion or as the craving to experience big change.

The nuance of each death we’ve experienced together in our family is notable. No two deaths are alike, not one bit. Not our Grandpa or Grandpa or Grandma or Grandma or Father or Brother or puppy or dog or cats.

This particular loss we sank into a long, long time ago. Yet its current immediacy is so vivid, even amidst a 20-year fog of where did she go.

Disease fumigates the pangs of grief, disinfecting the spiritual potential of a more sanctified demise. The fumes of a slow cloud consume the clarity of a goodbye. And now, like a lighthouse on a sordid cliff, her death shines out to illuminate the particals of the horrid, wet, human experience obscuring the space this mortal finality exists in from a landed approach. We can see it, feel it even, plainly sense that it is there and yet the loss itself is not the light her death hath struck but the murky space it stews in, and remembers.

Memory… how funny of a simple glue we rely on so heavily to exist. Pasting ourselves together with it. Pasting our interpretation of everyone else together with it. Using it to craft a semblance of structure in this mad mess of life so that the day-to-day of this material realm is somewhat manageable.

Alzheimer’s is a cunty, complex little beast. So complex that we oversimplify its reality quite grotesquely, describing it to laymen as though bugs infested our loved ones’ art studio of a mind, eating away at the glue that gave them their potential. “Ah, her memory isn’t what it was…”

Meanwhile, she’s confined to a bed with her eyes taped open, being spoonfed blended moosh without the strength or recollection to rotate her own head or lift a single hand or foot.

But it was her, even when it wasn’t. And so, now it really isn’t.

It’s been twenty-one days since she passed on and re-united with the undivided. Twenty-one days since she shed the boundaries of her body and immersed herself back into the grand everything else.

I am not exactly up to date with the needs I must need do to continue down this path of post-mortem healing. Though I will guarantee both you and myself that as different as each death is, there is always actual internal organizing of one’s grief that gets sorted through as you move through the necessary external tasks.

Time doesn’t heal, nor do to-dos, but they do facilitate a very useful management software that runs throughout our human compositions. As fresh grief leaks about ourselves, meandering into corridors otherwise occupied, these material tickers, Time and To-Dos, help to go about putting the grief away, ushering it into places where it will live with less of a clash with one’s other personality occupants. The things that make us who we are get used to the new crowd, and more space is found within our minds and bodies for our eternal spirit to go on experiencing it all.

And so, here I go, unto Day Twenty-One, where I hope to accomplish a bit more to settle my Mother’s affairs than I did over my last few days of working life.

Thank you for being here with me,

Julia

120mm photo by Alan Michnoff, my betrothed, in our backyard. Texas, May 2024