dispatch from the mother country
little note: it will not have escaped you that i sometimes/often write some cursed things about how my mother is falling apart, and what it is like to witness it and accompany her as a pilgrim towards grief. it helps me to write about it and then fling it into the void of the internet and towards the eyes of strangers who have no feelings about it whatsoever. i don’t know exactly why this should be, but i’m, as they say, trusting the process.
i understand that you may not want to read about that; i will always put mother in some form in the title so that you know which emails not to open. if you’ve wondered how i am, well, i’m ok, all senses resonating and am loving the world (mainly).
today i was happy; it will happen again.
her ability to tell a story has all but left her. what remains are those filler phrases which we all have, the mind-focusing, time-pausing ones which allow you to take up again the thread of what you were saying, those that make the space in which you can organize your thoughts for the next part, as in the iliad when homer says the wine dark sea, or goddess of the flashing eyes. a phrase which does not need to be there for story’s sake, but which is part of the architecture of telling anyway. she has kept all of hers, and they make up most of what she says now. i imagine that there is meaning in the cadence of them, but this is fanciful and possibly (probably?) not true. before her fall, she told me stories every time she came, several in fact, but they were familiar to me and i could see that they had already begun to disintegrate.