’tis a day filled with sunshine and light; outside the birds fly freely basking in the heady solar glow, inside the light casts different shadows, making the world outside seem distant and unreal. Separate.
My father continues to be unable to eat or drink; and maintains his stance in denial of his illness; “i will get better” he says though he eats not; denial is a strange state with no logic nor sense to it. Disregarding all facts, denial takes from it’s owner the acceptance so hard gained and leaves instead a state of unreality. A place where the death of one’s self is not to occur.
I write this lay’d at the foot of my parents; my mother’s hayfever has returned from whence I know not where, but it is almost certainly caused by the stress of the current situation rather than the presence or absence of pollen in the atmosphere.
For once I am grateful to my university; their insistence on a course so strong in psychology and sociology has forced me to read and grasp – at least at a basic level – the rudiments of current thinking on the matter of death. Kubler-Ross’s 1960s theory, that of the five stages of death, with the modern modification of allowing repeated transit between stages, and stages to be interlinked randomly, is certainly that which I favour – and it seems to help me.
And I’m hoping that it may help my mother. On my return home I will send her back my copy of Death and Dying, such that she may also be better able to understand denial; but whether it will help her with her own denial, that is another matter on which I am unable to have any certainty.
She swings, wildly, from moment to moment – one moment accepting, and another moment decrying the use of a drug with hideous long term side effects; why risk cardiac arrhythmias for an anti-emetic (anti-nausea) drug? Like scales with one weight removed, my mother’s balance; my father; is no longer present (despite his continued presence on this earth) and she is unable to self correct. I hate myself for being the voice of disent, the voice saying ‘because he’s dying’. But without it she flails, angry as a hornet, at those who try to tell her how she should look after him (and she generally has good reason), but it does her no good.
And what of me? In all of this I sit, finding the distance that has carried me thus far; awaiting my moments to allow it out. Swimming this morning, albeit without the grandure of faded glories, I fought my way up and down the pool allowing the anger and frustration vent through my limbs. Length after length, until a mere ten minutes remained before the pool became public and my breath did come in short angry bursts. Walking away from the pool I felt a calmness return; and Rebecca did carry me home swiftly, like the wind upon the sails, that I might spend more time here.
It is ironic then that after my swift journey I was instead moved to carry out a bizzare mission of mercy, removing the fish from our short section of drying river (its course runs dry by my parents house, for the majority of the winter it does not flow) to the nearest village where it remains constant. Even there the river barely runs; pools of almost stagnant water filled with duck weed and the carelessly tossed litter of the many must be negociated by the fish placed in the only accessable spot. Will that these trout survive; their glorious beauty ensnared my vision for long minutes when they were released.
I think now of these miriad trout; their lives would have been forfeit if they had remained, but instead they now are free to swim or tarry in the stream. Another trip will certainly be required tomorrow for there are many more of their breatheren hiding in the drying pool outside my parents home; neither I, nor my mother are quick enough to capture them when there are so many routes of escape. But as the heat and dryness bring the pool’s size to more manageable levels, the remaining trout will be more easily caught and taken to freedom.
But for the moment I am content to simply remain here at my father’s side. Not speaking, for he sleeps, but to spend time with one’s parents before they die is not a luxury afforded to every person and one for which I am alternately grateful and pained.
