Dying

 I feel like I'm dying, day by day, in this lovely house that our daughter made for us just as surely as my wife died in that room full of machines and flashing lights and alarming sounds and the horror of the defeated body and mind and spirit slipping away before our desperate eyes as we watched her own desperation gather and finally set itself, for all eternity, in hers...

LPK
@ Dreamwidth
5.6.2017

Talking to an Insect

My wife always insisted that insects found in the house be put outside, to live out their natural lives, rather than being killed for having been found in a place which we'd claimed for our exclusively human use.

So this morning, when I noticed one of those brownish-gray, sort of flat and diamond-shaped little creatures, which my granddaughters call "stink bugs," walking along the top edge of my computer monitor, I went downstairs, found a disposable snack cup on the kitchen counter, and used it to carry the critter outside where I placed it on top of the covered trash bin, hopefully to find its way in the natural world.

Before leaving the room to do that, however, I had taken a moment to explain to it that I was doing this to honor the wishes of my late wife who established this practice in our family and whom I'm quite sure would've been pleased to be remembered in this way. As much, or more so, than being remembered with the rose-colored granite, now in transit from the midwest, to mark her resting place.

Nevertheless I can hear her saying to me, in that mock-serious way of hers, "You do realize, Lar, that you're talking to an insect..."

LPK
@ Dreamwidth
5.6.2017

They Ambush Me

They ambush me with their words. The books and other things that I now read, hoping for distraction.

Somehow, inexplicably, it happens with those words which would otherwise seem intent on telling someone else's story.

And so I struggle from my chair and walk across the room, momentarily blinded.

I open the computer screen and try to write my own...

LPK
@Dreamwidth
5.6.2017

The Ones Before

 My father said, after my mother died, that he didn't know if he could do this.

He didn't know if he could do this, sustain a life, but he did.

They were strong, that way, his generation and the ones before.

They may not have always been sure, but they were strong, and my own existance is one proof of that.

Now, this story is in my hands. And I know I have to write it or it will be lost.

And in order to write it, I have to live.

For my wife, my father, and the ones before...

LPK
@Dreamwidth
5.6.2017