And Bad is the New Good

Last weekend, Tom and I took Friday off, rented a car, and went up to see Ann and Mac at the Sea Ranch, always a treat for these Mission neighborhood dwellers. We stopped at Toast in Novato for lunch on Friday, and did the same thing on Sunday. (French fries with blue cheese melted over them: very fine idea.)

It wasn’t particularly sunny up there. In fact, it was overcast and a bit brisk, which is my new favorite weather: Lousy is the new sunny. It is too damn hot in San Francisco now, and it is too damn humid. When I wake up and see it’s grey and forbidding out, I’m delighted, because cycling in hot, humid weather is yucky and disgusting, not so much during, but definitely after.

Grey weather also makes for excellent napping conditions, so while Tom strode up and down the trail along the water’s edge—he did that both Saturday and Sunday; very odd—I reposed peacefully in the guest room upon my bed next to the open window. Sleeping at night with the sound of the ocean wind and its cool touch on my face was also splendid.

On Sunday afternoon, right after we got back, I went to see A. at the hospice. To me, he looked noticeably worse. In fact, for a moment or two there, I wasn’t sure he wasn’t dead. His eyes were open but unseeing. The only thing he said was to ask for a damp towel, which he used to wipe his face with. Then he kind of went to sleep and I kind of sat there, until I began to feel I was somehow derelict in my duties, and held his hand for a bit.

When he next briefly awoke, he seemed mildly surprised to find his hand being held and casually moved it out of reach, so then I just sat with him, and after an hour, I walked home, buying a bunch of asters on the way.

I initially signed up to do vigil, which is sitting with people who are expected to die imminently, in hopes no one will die alone. I now think that may be rather strange, in that I likely won’t have met the person beforehand, so I will be meeting almost-a-corpse, and we likely won’t talk, though in training it was stressed that hearing is the last sense to go, so it is very appropriate to talk to someone who is dying—but what to say, exactly?

I was thinking of perhaps reading some Mary Oliver poems, but what if the person is thinking, “I can’t move, I can’t talk, I can’t even see you and I have no idea who you are, but I CAN still hear, and that isn’t my idea of poetry, mister! Don’t you have the Old Testament?”

Or do I say “Everything is OK” to someone who, for all I know, is in a panic, thus making me a liar, or do I say “There is nothing to be afraid of; you are perfectly safe” to someone who hadn’t until that moment thought there WAS anything to be afraid of?

I guess I will learn as I go along.

I’m going to wrap up by explaining the use of capital letters in this blog: It’s due to my lousy memory, to wit: I draft a post and know which words I want to emphasize, but when I paste the entry into Blogger, formatting such as italics gets wiped out, and likely in the intervening two minutes I will have forgotten which words were meant to be emphasized, but if I put them all in caps to begin with, that is retained in Blogger.

I could at that point change to italics, but I also keep soft and hard copies of every post, just in case, and when I paste from the web into a Word document, again the formatting gets wiped out, and I’m too lazy to look back at the actual post to see which words were italicized, and that’s why the caps.