6000onions

I am spending a lot of time in the darkroom lately. No, not A dark room, THE darkroom – to be specific, the Asheville Darkroom, which is an amazing nonprofit that allows people like me to spend much needed hours in the dark inhaling dangerous chemicals and creating fucking amazing art. No, seriously. I mean, mine probably isn’t all that fucking amazing – YET – but it’s getting there and I’m loving every single step along the way. This, on the left, is a solarized portrait of my friend Jodi. Is it not amazing? It never met a microchip until I just now scanned it. Nope, that right there is your basic free range hand crafted artisanal photography, direct from my 35 year old East German camera to Kodak Tri-X film to the darkroom to my house (where it briefly got stepped on by dogs but then, what doesn’t?)

I am learning a lot. I have taken a class and a workshop on cyanotype – also totally fucking amazing and I’m going to be doing a lot more of it as soon as I brush up on my math skills so I can mix the chemistry for slightly less than the sixty images the bottles recommend. Next Sunday I’m taking another workshop, this time on, basically, how to fuck with your images right there in the dark (although for some strange reason it’s not called that, go figure) and I will be making even more cool things. For the last 4 months I’ve been spending at least four hours a week in the darkroom, just printing and printing and having the time of my life. So I’m going to put up a gallery of my scanned images, bit by bit, as I remember how to do that. You can buy them, if you like! You can ask me to go places with my East German camera and take brooding, grainy black and white pictures of you and I will probably do that – assuming you are somewhere I can get to in less than half an hour in an 18 year old car with no air conditioning.

ART IS GOOD FOR THE SOUL and since David Bowie was apparently holding the world in balance and his loss has thrown the entire thing down the tubes, we all need a little help with our souls.

In other news, Theo is the world’s healthiest 14 year old dog despite being deaf. I really – no really really REALLY – like living alone even if my room does smell alarmingly like mold and it turns out that I am, in fact, kinda messy even when all alone. I am healthy aside from somewhat high blood pressure and high cholesterol, which seems unfair since I’m vegetarian. Also I’m fat and need to quit smoking, but we knew that. All the animals are doing well, I’m still toiling grumpily away in the book mines and I think that is all the news that’s fit to print. Keep an eye on this space because, I swear, soonish there will be a new gallery – a gallery of artisanal photography. Whee!!

PS you should give all your extra money to the Asheville Darkroom; they really need it. God knows I give them mine because, while I could have taken up a less expensive art form, like solid gold sculpture or something, this is where I’m at, and I couldn’t do it, or not well, without them. And you can do it too! Or just send money.

Yesterday, somebody came in my house. 

I know they came in because since miles left for Baltimore (another long story) some 2 weeks ago, my kitchen has been very tidy. This is new for me, and I treasure it. So yesterday, when I came home after first, working all day and second, putting in some quality time at the bar, I knew immediately that someone had been in the kitchen. The nutritional yeast had been moved and opened and left opened on the counter. Nothing else was touched. It was not the cat or the dogs; it’s a small and heavy dish and the precision of its placing was done by human fingers.

Nutritional yeast is a special thing. You only have that shit around if you were raised by hippies or were a hippy yourself. Nobody else on planet earth even knows what the fuck it is, even though it is fantastic on popcorn and will transform your boring vegetarian soup into something fit for kings. 

The Venn diagram overlap of people who know my dogs and know the peculiarities of my back door and know my kitchen and would open a small glass dish of yeast to eat a pinch is quite small. Or at least I think it is. There are five people in my world who fit. I know where four of them were. 

So it must be the fifth. And yet, I cannot ask her if it was her because. . . what if it wasn’t? 

I don’t even want to deal with the ramifications of that. 

Last night I locked this house down like Fort Knox – up to and including wiring a broomstick across the back door, it’s Pinterest worthy, if Pinterest was as obsessed as it should be with surviving the coming trumpocalypse – and I still got up at 2 am and did it all over again. 

I have only told two people about this (my best friend and my daughter, I called them both immediately and was all incoherently freaking the fuck out until they calmed me down) because I feel, somehow, obscurely ashamed. Such a strange thing, yes, somebody was in my house, no, I swear I know this but no, nothing was stolen, nothing was wrecked and no, I’m not imagining it, really, really, I am not. 

Last week somebody left a battered copy of Spiritual Midwifery in my mailbox. OK, it’s a great book, I used to have a copy, whatever, Asheville, I laughed it off. Yesterday, somebody came in my house. I am not laughing so much right now. 

So from the land of odd paranoia, I am writing this. I don’t care, really, I mean, my nutritional yeast is your nutritional yeast, and I wouldn’t have gotten through natural childbirth without Spiritual Midwifery. But leave a note next time. Because I would like to sleep again in this millennium. 

My foot got better – well, more or less. It took five damn months, but it did it. I mean, it is still a little swollen and prone to occasional twinges, but aren’t we all? In other spring news, I took a black and white film darkroom class and loved it. I joined the Asheville Darkroom and now you can find me there whenever I can squeeze in the time. Everything else is more or less the same but I did go see my friends Elizabeth and John in Birmingham last week and here are the pictures! Many many pictures of rust. And a median fire on I 24 on my way back. And Rock City, a stop on my way home which is full of gnomes and screaming schoolchildren. Vacation! I had one! It was great! I go back to work tomorrow! Bah! But anyway, here are some pictures. Enjoy!

FUCK. THAT. SHIT.

And that pretty much sums it up. 2015 was a stellar year for cackling demon toads from the seven hells, a year renowned in infamy and pain. It pretty much sucked rancid donkey balls in hell, all long, long twelve horrid months of it. There were a few bright points – there were some concerts and art shows, lovely conversations with good friends, laughter, wine, good food, good books- hell, there was even Jurassic World – and so on – but those were grievously outweighed by all the shit that just kept right on raining down the pike. And as I sit here with my crutches beside me, with a broken left foot and a right arm that suddenly and inexplicably seems to want to stop working, I must say that 2016 seems to be carrying right on in its ugly, greasy, blood crusted footsteps.

So I have not been here since last October, when I was still worrying about skin cancer. Turns out that particular monster has at least temporarily been defeated, so that’s good. I have big old mega bills to pay for it, though, which I am afraid to even look at. Back in the day if you had insurance, you presented your card at the doctor’s office and LO, your bill was paid. No more! Now your card and your $50 copay just gets you in to see the doctor. All the many many many extra bills will be sent your way later. New times! New debts!

As I keep saying to anyone who will listen, welcome to the 21st century! Much like the 19th!

Well. In late October my good friend Elizabeth came to visit, so that was a lovely bright spot. Then in November there was Thanksgiving, at which we hosted 19 wandering souls for a dinner on Wednesday night.  On the Sunday after Thanksgiving while we were all at work, the burglars came. Yes, burglars. They left with two old laptops, my beloved iPad, the bluetooth keyboard I used with my iPad, Annie’s old iPad1, Miles’ fancy designer sunglasses, Jordan’s old and much loved North Face backpack and, inexplicably, a full 2 liter bottle of Coca Cola. The police duly came and said, oh well. I called the insurance company and they, too, basically said, oh well. I have a $1000 deductible and no proof that I ever owned any 2007 laptops, much less the iPad. So that was fun.

The holidays arrived and Christmas was a lovely day; we got presents, ate and drank too much and watched Gremlins. Then of course all hell broke loose and the Sunday after Christmas (when I am the evil Empress of the Galaxy I will ban all Sundays after holidays) I ignominiously tumbled from a stool – not even a barstool, just a stepstool, in my closet, in the morning, and I wasn’t even hungover let alone drunk – and broke my left foot in a manner most alarming. See above. And since then – it’s been ten horrible days – I have been stumbling around on crutches, spending way too much time in bed and generally being rather miserable. I made it back to work for two days in there but now I am back at home, cranky, filthy and pretty much morphing into something that lurches out of bushes at passersby.

I had never quite understood just how bad it is to lose the use of a foot. It is fucking horrible, is what it is, because everything just becomes incrementally more difficult if not impossible. And everything was, frankly, difficult enough already. I cannot get in and out of my house without help, because it turns out that the step at my front door is too high for crutches, something I had never noticed in the last 9 years. I cannot take a bath or a shower, because I can’t get in and out of the bathtub without help. Audrey and I went and got a bath chair – nothing sexier or more glam than one of those contraptions squatting in the shower! – and she took down the glass doors, so it is possible now, but perilous, and I need her here when I attempt it. So I’ve had one shower in the last ten days, which is not enough when you are also having ridiculous hot flashes like ten times a day to the point where your glasses steam up and your hair drips sweat. You can’t carry anything on crutches, which means I can’t get my coffee from the kitchen to the bedroom and, well, on and on and bloody on, forever. TMI? TFB. Also, although I know this will come as a shock, I am not naturally graceful or athletic and man, turns out I SUCK at crutches. I keep narrowly escaping death by gravity and my shoulders are screaming at me. This is probably what is wrong with my arm, bah.

So here we are, hobbling into 2016. This is going to be a better year GODDAMNIT. If it kills me. And partly because I don’t think I can survive another year like 2015 and partly because my old friend Adam showed up the other day and gave me a mystical hippie pep talk, I am not going to concentrate any more on the bad. I am going for the GOOD. I am going to BUILD THE UNIVERSE I WANT TO LIVE IN! I am going to UNLEASH THE CREATIVE GENIUS THAT DWELLS WITHIN ME! Or something like that. Anyway, I’m going to draw more. Paint more. Photograph more. And blog more. And if I don’t do these things, send me an email and yell at me, because sweet whispering jesus in a snocone, what the hell is all this pain for if it doesn’t produce some motherfucking art?

I met a friend for drinks a little while back and we realized with a sinking feeling that we have reached that age where we have medical tales of woe. Oh god. I am lucky, of course, since for the most part I have been ridiculously healthy all my life, but damn, once you get near that half century mark things can get a bit dire. And of course, as noted by peevish essayists dating back at least a thousand years, stories of medical crap are of consuming interest to precisely one person: the one affected. For everybody else they are at best a snooze, at worst they give you that itchy feeling that you need to gnaw your own arm off to escape. SO! Let me tell you about my operation! 

I had a scary mole on my arm so, after a few months of worrying about it off and on, I actually managed to acquire a family physician of my very own (I don’t mean I bought one, although bring on the Health-O-Bot, but instead I am a recognized patient at a family practice.) This as you probably know, fellow American, is a big pain in the ass that takes months. Once achieved, though, the sky is your limit. Your health insurance won’t actually cover much, although it claims it will, but still! You can go to the doctor as much as your pockets will bear! Anyway, my doctor agreed that the mole was not so good and so he took it off. Then his office called me and said, actually, that mole was very not good, and you need to go to a dermatologist. So I duly presented myself at the dermatologist where I found out that a) the mole was what is called severely atypical (in English very very not good) and that the weird mark on the bottom of my foot that I had been ignoring cheerfully for the last five or six years was also quite a not good thing. The dermatologist, who has all the warmth and charm of your average speculum, told me that he was going to cut a large chunk out of my arm where the original mole was and a somewhat smaller chunk out of the bottom of my foot. This happened last Friday. 

I lay on the table looking assiduously at the white, white wall, trying to ignore the fact that there was an operation happening on my arm. “You know,” I said chattily, “The dentist has a video screen attached to one of those lamp things that shows, like, nature videos with soothing music. You should get one of those.”                                                                                                                                                                                      “Huh,” said the dermatologist, “But then my nurses would be in here all day watching it. Ho ho ho.” “Giggle,” said the nurse obligingly and I, outraged, also chuckled obediently because, okay, principles are one thing but the man was currently engaged in carving up my arm. I am fond of my arm. I use it regularly. I am still angry though because if my boss said something that condescending and clueless and yes, sexist, not to mention indicative of complete disdain for his colleagues, I would be furious. 

They moved on to my foot. “This is just a scraping,” said the dermatologist dismissively. “Wait,” I said, “You said you would go ahead and take the whole thing now so I didn’t have to go through recovering from it twice.” He ignored me and swept majestically from the room, his work done. “You’ll get the biopsy results sometime next week,” said the nurse, “keep the stitches wrapped up with some ointment on them.” Then she left too and then, after a few minutes, so did I, with 8 stitiches in my arm and a hole in my foot. It’s  a fairly big hole, actually, it looks kind of like a crazed student took  took a number 2 pencil, set it on fire and stabbed me in the bottom of the foot. It feels like that too. 

Do you know it is very difficult to deal with a hole in the bottom of your foot? Particularly if you have the kind of job where you cannot sit down. I went to work on Saturday – and Sunday, and Monday and Tuesday – and although I sat down as much as I could it was not enough. My boss watched me limping and went out and bought me a pair of slippers, which was incredibly kind of him, but I think it was still not enough because today, which is Wednesday, it is of course all swollen and red and painful. This is America. I am broke. It costs me $50 every time I walk into the dermatologists office, or $85 to go to urgent care or $35 for my regular doctor and I am about out of paid time off, so if I don’t go to work, I will not get paid, which will impede me coming up with that $35 or $50 or $85. 

Anyway, I am now trying to get someone to look at my stupid foot, or, best case scenario, to just call me in a prescription. I am not having any luck at all, although I am obediently pressing 2 when prompted and leaving my name and number and birthdate and a description of my problem. This is, I think, good training for the self pity Olympics at which, as you can tell, I am going for a gold. However! I have decided that if I am in fact dying of cancer, I will at least not have to quit smoking, so, yay for that plan. UPDATE! I take back the mean things I said about the dermatologist. They just called me back and are phoning me in a prescription. Hurrah! All is now well. Until it isn’t. 

We are having a bad flea late summer. Most of the summer, we were flea free and I congratulated myself on my total slackness: I never walk the dogs anymore, so they only have our yard to run around in, hence they are not exposed to other, inferior dogs with their declasse flea problems. Or so I said. Then August hit and with it came the plague. I had bites all over my back and although the dogs can roll around on their backs and howl when that happens, it affords little relief to the suffering human. Some, though. And I have never been more grateful for Annie’s gift and legacy of dollar store back scratchers. They are the best thing in the world, creepy little bamboo hands. 

I bought expensive flea medication online, naturally only noticing when it got here that it doesn’t actually kill fleas, it just makes them sterile. Well, terrific: the adult fleas, discovering their plight, bit more viciously. I vacuumed as previously reported in this blog, repeating the mantra “the vacuum is your number one weapon in the war against fleas.” I have no idea where I got this sentence, but it’s a good one, right? Then I caved and spent more money on more meds that supposedly actually killed fleas. And I think they did – the scratching got a bit better. For a while. Now they’re all becoming hysterical again and doing entertaining things like scratching themselves on the siding (I have been trying and trying to take a video of Perdita scratching her butt on the wall; it is hilarious but the minute I take out the phone she stops and looks at me, deeply pained. Perdita does not want to be a Youtube star.) and on the porch benches. Now they all have little dreadlocks from the scratching and I am counting the days until I can dose them again. 

Meanwhile, in more serious and scary dog news, Django, the purebred Springer Spaniel who is probably singlehandedly responsible for all the stories about purebred dogs and their issues – food allergies? Check. Random odd medical emergencies? Check. Ate a couch, no, two? Check. – stopped eating. If the other dogs stopped eating it would not suprise me: Perdita is the only dog in the world who is determined to keep her girlish figure and Theo is 13 years old, which is 91 in human years, or, as I like to say, 206. But Django is wholly food motivated and he will eat anything, from CDs to socks to furniture. Fortunately, he has so far always also been able to digest anything, but this time I feared the worst. Off he went to the vet with Audrey. No socks, no blockage, nothing visibly wrong, but $380 worth of blood tests later (it is worth having a care credit card if you don’t have one, pet owners) it turns out that his liver enzyme counts are off the charts and not in a good way. The vet kindly gave us a month’s worth of liver meds – exceeding expensive liver meds, so it was nice of her to give them for free – and suggested an ultrasound. What would you do, I said, if the ultrasound comes back bad? The same thing we’re doing, she said, and I said, okay, lets try this for a month without the ultrasound and see what happens. He is also on antibiotics and an appetite stimulant and now we wait and see. He seems perfectly healthy – he is just impossible Django, bouncing off the walls as usual and scratching in ridiculous ways. And indeed all his other numbers are the peak of perfection for a nine year old dog, 63 in human years, or almost to social security if they didn’t keep moving the bar up. So if you all would hold him in the light as the Quakers say, we would be grateful. Because as much as I bitch about having to make a vat of dogfood every week (ground turkey, sweet potatoes and brown rice, with ground up eggshells for calcium and a multivitamin tossed in) I don’t really want to stop any time soon. 

I have made three big changes in my life recently. These are things I sort of said I would never do again – never say never! -but I did them anyway: I cut my hair, I went on antidepressants and I started smoking again. And I’m super happy about two of those decisions.

My hair looks, if I do say so myself, awesome. It is the haircut that my mother and Annie bugged me to get and I stubbornly resisted since I was about, um, 25. Rarely united, my mother and Annie, but on the subject of Felicity Would Look Better with Short Hair they were as one for thirty years of not particularly subtle hints. Naturally I insisted on keeping it long. But then a couple weeks ago in a fit of not being able to stand myself anymore (not even in the dusty mirror in the darkness of the back hall – my fashion tip for ladies of a certain age is always, always, maintain a dust covered mirror in a barely lit corner of your house, you will look amazing in it, the Evil Queen knew her stuff) I went and got it taken off by the utterly brilliant Cody at Blue Ribbon. Now it’s slightly above shoulder length and choppy and my gawd, through the miracle of good hair, it seems to have gotten rid of my double chin. I am never – there’s that never again – going back to long hair.

And then I started up on the antidepressants, specifically lexapro, again. There were a couple of false starts – I am hopeless at remembering to take pills every day and also I cannot, apparently, handle the full dose recommended but do better on half a dose – but then, last week, I suddenly realized that I felt – better. Okay. Decent. There was light in the world. And I had vacuumed the living room and I wasn’t lying in bed thinking about various interestingly bizarre methods of suicide. I can’t quite believe it, but I don’t feel like I am trapped in a tiny cage with a hamster wheel and Morrissey on autorepeat forever anymore. Don’t get me wrong – I’m not, like, PERKY or anything, gods forbid – but I am no longer paralyzed and constricted and wrapped in sorrow like a hair shirt. I feel okay! I can get things done! It is fucking amazing! So now I have finally figured out what a psychologist told me years ago: I have to stay on them. Forever. Well, okay then. It’s worth it.

But then there is the smoking. God damn it. Two and a half fucking years down the drain due to grief and stress and being around more people who smoke than usual. I’ll just have a drag, I said, and then I went to, well, can I roll one? I’ll just roll my own, which faded imperceptibly into I’ll just smoke when I’m drinking which has gone into fuck it, I give up. I’m right back to smoking half a pack a day, fuck, what a moron I am. I swore I would never ever do this again and here I am. But I will quit again, I swear it, and this time I will get the tattoo I was planning before, to remind me, to look at on my arm and tell me don’t pick that goddamn cigarette up, no, you cannot have just one.

In other news I am sorely addicted to yet another couple of demonic King games. One of them is called Alphabetty and it’s an incredibly annoying little word game that drives me crazy but I cannot stop. Even though I am not, honestly, all that good at it. If I stare at the screen long enough I manage to convince myself that everything is a word – fnord! It’s got to be in the dictionary! Ruislaen! Sneert! – and that doesn’t go any better in Alphabetty than it does in Scrabble. And then, if that and Bubble Witch weren’t bad enough, I started playing Paradise Bay, a deeply evil tropical cousin of SimCity Buildit, which I have been addicted to for yoinks now. These are the kinds of games where you have to keep making stuff to trade and getting materials and all in all, it’s a lot like work and why, why am I so compelled to continue? Like I’m lying there in bed thinking, well, if I grow enough cotton I can make more nets and catch more shrimp and then grill that and then trade it and then. . . yeah. I should be getting paid for this. At least when I played Minecraft I could kid myself that it was creative. But it is what it is, and I have to go now: my mill jobs are ready.

Annie passed away last Wednesday, July 22, just at about 4:45. My brother Bill was with her and I got back there just as she was leaving. She had spent the last two days in the Solace Hospice Center at CarePartners which is a kind of amazing place: I mean it is so fancy it makes the Grove Park look like Motel 6. And everyone is super nice and it is very quiet and serene and there are gardens and a walkway and a great room and inlaid floors and, well, if life must end it’s a good place for it to do so, I suppose. But I would prefer that it not do so, that everyone become like immortal vampires, frozen at, oh, about 35 or so. Like Annie is here, which is how I will remember her: all of Annie, all her wonderful self and great wit and peals of laughter.

I am surprised at how utterly sad I am. I mean, I love Annie (and I will not say love-d, no, I won’t put that in past tense because it has not gone away, far from it) with all my heart but hers was the kind of death that is generally put into the category of “blessed release.” She was 86 years old and in failing health; her mind had been fragmented repeatedly, first by the big stroke in 2008 and over the last year by whatever aging, fatigued synapses and neurons that kept giving way in her brain. She stayed alive long enough to see Oona (her stepdaughter, my stepcousin) one more time and as soon as Oona headed for her plane to Barcelona Annie put down her hands and proceeded with determination to die in earnest. It did not take long although every hour spent sitting in hospice is the same as 24 hours anywhere else. I tried reading to her from the Tibetan Book of the Dead (it is the way of our people, yes, that is what hippies do) but she said that it scared her. She asked if she was dying and I said, well, honey, pretty much. Soon after that she could no longer speak and I’m not sure if much got through to her, but I didn’t read any more Tibetans. Instead I read first from Thurber and then started a Blandings Castle novel by P.G. Wodehouse and we got through the first five chapters in two days. Every so often she would almost swim to the top of consciousness and when she did she heard about the exploits of Freddie Threepwood and chuckled. And that is a better way to die, perhaps, than explicit descriptions of the bardo and the hungry ghosts therein.

And I am devastated.

When my father died 15 years ago I was devastated, partly because it seemed too soon – he was 74 – and partly because it closed off the avenues for reconciliation I was still naively hoping would appear. 70s child raised on TV: where is my very special episode where Dad and I hash out our differences and admit our wrongs and express our love for each other and everything ends up okay? Well. We never had one and he died and that was that: there is no closure, you know, in real life. Or a laugh track, so it’s a trade off I guess.

When my mother died 7 years ago I was devastated, partly because it seemed too soon – she was 81 – and partly because I loved my mother so much -LOVE my mother so much – that I can’t even now quite express it. And partly because it was sudden and unexpected and there was no lengthy illness, no slow deterioration, coming up to it. And as she died I knew in my heart of hearts, although I would not then perhaps have admitted it, that my mother was the only glue holding our dysfunctional family together and without her it would all fly violently apart. Which it did. My son, grieving for Annie the other night, cried for his grandmother, my mother, her sister, as well: I miss her so much, he said, and when she died it destroyed our family. We have never come all the way back together since because yes, there is no closure, there are no neat, pat resolutions or redemptions in real life. There just is the is, the now, the stumbling and the four am tears.

So having been through all that, this death of all deaths, expected for a long time now, I thought would not destroy me. Annie and I had no unfinished business: we love each other, we got along like a house on fire, we always thoroughly enjoyed time spent in each others’ company and everything was good between us. Her loss isn’t going to fragment the family: there isn’t enough of it left to destroy for one thing and for another she was never the focal point in the way that Mom was. So why am I so sad? I keep asking myself, Why can’t I see this as a joyous thing, as her reunion with her many beloved friends gone before, as a return to the cosmos, a natural part of the cycle of life? And I’m trying to see that, I really am, but instead I am grieving, helpless, bereft and wondering why the hell the world is so unfair as to take away the people I love?

Because there is no closure, I suppose, and because the is is the only thing there is. Annie’s death brought a whole big giant list of tasks to my plate – I am the executor (I kind of want a costume for this job, a shiny suit and maybe a cape, THE EXECUTOR written in big letters on my chest) and that turns out to be a huge responsibility involving metric shit tons of paperwork and grief from everyone involved. Annie was also the last of her generation in my family: the grownups are all gone now, my parents, my aunt and uncle on my father’s side and now Annie – the adults have moved away and the children – particularly me, The Executor – are in charge. But I am not a child anymore – I could use a costume for that statement too, maybe a black one this time – just a sad grownup, in a messy house, with Annie’s things here and there in boxes, and I know for the next forever I will find them, as I did her shoes last night, and lose myself in just tears and sorrow.

Her shoes are here and she is not. And that just sucks.

The Queen of Bohemia is now under hospice care.

There. I said it. It is freaking me right out and keeping me up at night, this little fact, this single simple sentence. You see, I did it, or rather I sat there at a table with helpful, kind people who said to me gently, we think it is time to call hospice. “They’re so nice!”  they said enthusiastically, “And they will help.”

“But there is nothing wrong with her,” I protested, knowing that this was not altogether true, although there is nothing, really, that you can put a finger on, or get a blood test to verify. Nothing other than the dementia that has taken a crashing turn for the worse in the last six months, and then the way she says that her legs don’t work.  She falls a lot, now, which is one of the big reasons we moved her to assisted living, where everybody is very nice and calls me every time she falls. That’s how I know that she falls a lot. A very lot, in fact so much that I suspect her of doing it on purpose, of using the toddler logic that is all that is left to her: they made me move here because I fell down, ergo, if I fall down some more, I will move again. Falls = moving and she wants to move, to go home. Home to Greenwich Village in 1955 or Mallorca in 1975 but not really Asheville in 2015, which she has already forgotten. I sympathize. I also would like a time machine: I want to be 20, 27, 35, even 42 again; I too want to move. I do not like this life right now and the choices I have to make.

Yesterday she told me that she had forgotten she was a famous artist and it was great to be reminded. “All you have to do,” she enthused, “Is draw anything, any little thing and you get a million dollars! You should try it!” and then she laughed for a long time. She also complained about everything being too American. “Americans,” she said darkly, “Everywhere. And they keep pounding it in and pounding it in, Americans.”
“Yeah,” I said, “You are kind of surrounded by Americans, it is true. That happens in America. Awful, isn’t it?”

So. This is what has happened: she has more or less stopped eating. She had basically stopped before the big move, but now she is just not interested in eating anything at all, even things that she used to like, even grapes or pie or ice cream. This means, the hospice people say gently, that she already has some malnutrition and her body will start breaking down soon. It means, they say, that she has decided on some level that she is ready to go.

It could just mean she’s on a diet, I think – I know sometimes she still worries, fucked up but there you have it, women at any age from eight to eighty six: I’m so fat! I must diet! I just won’t eat tonight! So it could be a diet. Or she could just be not hungry, right? You don’t need much food, when you’re old.  I think these things but I don’t say them, because this diet is up to me: if I want, if I issue the orders, she will get fed whether she likes it or not. An Ensure army is waiting in the wings to keep her going. If I say so, an aide will sit there and feed her, turn her head to accept the spoon, make her drink the liquid nutrition and then, I guess, eventually the feeding tube.

What do you want to do? they asked me gently. You hold her health care power of attorney, when she was still coherent, or, well, more coherent than she is now, she trusted you to make these decisions. You hold the MOST form that spells out how much treatment is too much: do you go to the ER? Do you get a feeding tube? Do you get an IV?

No, I said, no spoon, no Ensure, no tube. If she sits down in front of three good meals a day and a snack or two and doesn’t eat them, it’s her choice to make and not mine.  But you see, it isn’t, because she doesn’t understand choices anymore so I must make them for her. And I don’t know, so I can only do the best I can, but it doesn’t feel like enough. But I do not believe that life is always the best option. I never have. Yet I don’t know, for sure, that she feels the same way. I think she does, or did. But I don’t know and so I wake up in the small hours and think, oh gods, oh gods, what am I doing? Do I have this right? Who died and made me god of this small world? What if I’m wrong?

I know that I would not want to live in the state that she is in now. I know that my mother, her sister, was adamantly and utterly opposed to staying alive past the point where you need other people to care for you, where your mind or your body has gone. I know that my whole family has a horror of losing our independence and to this end I sat and watched my father die at home, no feeding tube, no water even, three long and terrible days. I stopped the doctors – or tried to stop the doctors, easier, it turns out, said than done – keeping my mother alive too long and when it was time I sat with her and watched her go. I know that Annie too has lost friends and lovers and seen ghosts and all in all been comfortable on some level with this ongoing cycle, this life and death thing. I don’t think she would want, if she could see herself now, to keep going much longer. But did I ever sit down with the QOB at the Chelsea Hotel in 1988 and say, well, OK, Annie, just suppose that in 20 years you have a stroke and you get dementia and I have to take care of you, at what point do you want me to, uh, figuratively pull the plug? How do you feel about life with dementia?

We never had this conversation. Mostly we talked about boys and art and shoes – they should be simple but breathtaking – and sometimes apartments. “It’s such a drag, Lisa,” she said, passing me the joint, “That you don’t have enough bread to get a better pad.”

So I don’t know what she wants. But I have to make the choice and I said, ok, bring in hospice, thinking they would say, oh, she’s okay, this is silly, she isn’t dying. Instead they said, well, she meets our criteria and since then there have been kind and helpful people abounding, changing her medications, visiting her, calling me to ask kind and thoughtful questions. I asked for a lama and the Tibetan book of the dead and prayer bowls and that is going to happen, which kind of surprised me. They seem to think she is dying.

“What if she isn’t dying?” I said brightly, “What if this is all just a colossal joke?”
“That’s fine,” they said soothingly, “if she’s still alive in six months she will just be discharged.”

So now I feel like it’s a fraud and that worries me too. She can’t be dying, I think, not the QOB, this isn’t happening and even if it is, I didn’t make it happen. But what if I have set this machinery in motion? What if she is actually dying? What if she isn’t? What if I have made a terrible terrible mistake and she wants the spoon, the tube, the Ensure, the wheelchair, the slumped and terrible, silent figure in the hospital bed?

I know, or I think I know, that she doesn’t. And I do not believe in the sanctity of life over all things: I believe in death as a release. When it comes my turn, I want to die, as quickly and painlessly as possible and my kids and my friends and now you have been notified of this wish. No spoons. No Ensure. No tubes. But an overdose of heroin would be taken kindly. I can’t do that for Annie but I can do the other. I think it is the right thing to do. I think it is what she wants.

But I still can’t sleep through the dark hours.

Many years ago, from a screening of The Piano Player I attended at the art cinema with my mother and one of her friends: I gnaw my own arm off, leaving it there in the darkness to keep the older ladies docilely believing I am still sitting peacefully, enraptured by the film. Then, I rapidly crawl up the side of the theatre and burrow out through the wall with my handy penknife. I arrive in the bar next door, knock back six cocktails, and return to the theater in time to reattach my arm and earnestly discuss the film. It was so beautifully shot, I will say. And so movingly symbolic.

Some years later at the same cinema with an on again off again lover, watching the Coen brothers’, or one of them at least, thinly veiled biopic: I will just lean over and whisper that I must go to the bathroom. Lady problems, I will murmur meaningfully. Might have to run to the store. No, you stay. It will only take a minute. If they won’t let me back in I’ll meet you in the bar next door.

When I worked as a cashier at Home Depot for four interminable months: I will shimmy up that pole and launch myself across the ceiling, clinging bat like to the pneumatic tubes that funnel the money overhead all day. At the point in the dim back of the store just before the tubes reach the office I will saw one open, seizing the pods of cash within. Then I will scurry out the loading dock with my ill gotten gains. I can get far on $423 in ones. Or I could just go back to standing at my register staring into space and contemplating the many varied and splendidly outré ways there are to kill yourself at Home Depot.

Today, at an unfamiliar doctors office with my increasingly demented aunt in a  wheelchair  and my brother, only just out of the hospital himself, pale and ill: In a flash, I will leap to the window. I will force it open and wiggle through, magically shedding years and pounds. I will run to my car, also rejuvenated, and we will drive. And drive. And drive until we reach that cool pine shrouded campground in Oregon that I know waits for me.

Even if I have to gnaw my own arm off. Gndhsjfn. Shmgnrgggg. I am gnawing as fast as I can but it is just not fast enough.