EDLM Diary Entry, May 15, 2019
Some weeks punch hard, and you just have to roll with the punches and hope they don’t result in chronic traumatic encephalopathy. I have had such a week. In brief:
- My mother, who is suffering through late-stage rheumatoid arthritis, severe osteoporosis, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and has fractured multiple bones in recent months (including a shattered scapula and clavicle) was hospitalized with intractable acute pain. Her doctors think her pelvis has detached from her spinal column, and it is unclear whether or not she has an infection in her thoracic vertebrae; she is currently in a nursing home where she is being treated with a course of intravenous antibiotics. She is, naturally, heavily medicated. Both she and my father seem to be in denial about her chances of recovery, which are virtually nil. My wife and I visited her over the weekend, and she was not in full possession of her mental faculties; i.e., she was incapable of coherent reasoning and mostly drifted in and out of delirium.
- My grandfather passed away on Monday in a hospice in San Antonio. He was 100 years old and a veteran of the attack on Pearl Harbor. He had been suffering from dementia for several years. My mother was his legal guardian, which of course presents serious logistical issues, since she is non compos mentis and cannot travel in any case. The good news is that my grandfather had his affairs in good order, and his attorney has a directive concerning his funeral and probate matters. The bad news is that my mother’s unemployed and mentally ill younger brother and his son and daughter-in-law, who are all untrustworthy in ways I won’t even go into here, are living rent-free in my grandfather’s house. My mother’s youngest brother, who lives in Omaha, is recovering from a motorcycle accident and also cannot travel. Which means that
- My wife and I will have to fly to San Antonio soon to attend my grandfather’s funeral and supervise the execution of his will and the dispensation of his house as my mother’s representatives.
As all of that has been happening, I have been making every effort to conduct my life in a harmonious, mindful, and constructive manner. Apropos of which: As I reviewed my earlier diary entries for the Middletown project, I realized that thus far they have been relentlessly negative, and so I’d hoped to redress my prior barrage of dreary screeds with a sunnier take on my quotidian existence here in “Middletown.” But as I’ve just recapped, life had its own ideas: Shit happens, to coin a phrase popular in my time—and shit has certainly happened over the past week or so. Nonetheless, dear Reader of the Future, I will feign that species of ironical distance which lends levity to contemporaneous disaster (because who doesn’t enjoy a good thigh-slapping laugh at past calamities, once time has revealed their trivial import and we have survived the test—thus improving our characters, thickening the calluses on our souls, and providing us with another thigh-slapping yarn?) and attempt to tell my story with as much wit and charm as I can muster. Excelsior!
But before I begin: In furtherance of our intended focus on positive matters, there will be no mention of the day’s political news, which is as dismal and insalubrious as ever.[1]
Also, I see, as I look back at my earlier entries, that one could easily be left with the impression that “Middletown” is populated entirely by a congeries of mean-spirited dullards and mouth-breathers, credulous half-wits, shelf-browed yokels, shifty-eyed confidence men, priggish hypocrites and Pharisees, habitual drunkards and methamphetamine tweakers—with the possible exception of me, your faithful correspondent, LOL. Nothing could be further from the truth! Our town is also home to a great many decent, intelligent, public-spirited and altruistic men and women; and it is these good people that generate the good will and do the hard, necessary work of making our fair City a true community; that resist the entropic forces of decay and neglect; that counterbalance the forces of vampiric Capital—greed and exploitation and resource extraction and social atomization—that threaten to reduce us all to dollars and cents and so much urban blight and despair, the husks left over once value has been extruded. Let’s celebrate these people, shall we?
We met some of them in my last entry: the volunteer tax preparers serving the disadvantaged and elderly of our fair City. Working with them was a daily object lesson in how virtue and intelligence are not housed in any one person’s mind, but are socially distributed and shared: some of us know things that others don’t; some of us are brave in the face of things others fear; but we can still accomplish what needs to be done via communication and cooperation with other minds, by mutual encouragement, and by delegating tasks according to the abilities of each individual. This seems an obvious insight, but becoming involved in this process, developing bonds with people I might not ordinarily mix with, out of the desire to acquire new knowledge and accomplish common goals, is truly remarkable. It’s even more remarkable in the context of a volunteer relationship, in which none of us is truly an expert, none stands to gain materially, and the power imbalance found in professional or government offices—supplicant and priest, as it were—is absent or at least far less pronounced.
Dear Reader, I feel very much at home in these situations, with these people. I think they are my tribe, and my spiritual salvation in these dark times. As Fred Rogers[2] famously said, “When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’” I remember that quote every day, and I want to try, not just to look for the helpers, but to be a helper.
As the annual tax season wound down and my little cadre of tax preparers went our separate ways for the summer, I felt a lack. And so I decided to volunteer at a domestic violence shelter and crisis assistance center. Unfortunately, I’d only begun learning the ropes there when the current crisis within my own family reared up—though I intend to return once I’ve taken care of family business—but I was delighted to find another community of people dedicated to helping others, a light in the darkness. It was a pleasure to meet them, and I am thrilled at the prospect of returning to work with them. So many of the women and children this shelter serves are unused to being treated with kindness, and so grateful just to be treated as a human being. We have so far to go, dear Reader. But I have promised not to gaze into the Abyss.
As for today—the ostensible subject of this diary entry—it was uneventful. As I mentioned, I had already taken a few weeks’ leave of absence from the shelter because of all the family drama I’ve been dealing with, much to my chagrin, so I didn’t have to work a shift there. But then this morning I learned from my father that my grandfather’s funeral will not be held until May 31, which means that I won’t have to travel immediately, much to my relief. I went to Walmart (yes, Walmart, don’t judge me) to pick up a few groceries, a task I’d put off pending news of when we’d have to leave town. I cleaned the cats’ litter box and took out the trash. I puttered about in the garden, pulled a few weeds, watered my beans and potatoes. I transplanted my zucchini plants from the makeshift indoor growing stand I created under the basement sink to the garden, then spent an hour installing a new grow light. I took my tomato, eggplant, and pepper plants outside to harden them. My uncle in Omaha called me to chat and find out when we’d be arriving in San Antonio and where we’d be staying. I grilled pork chops and vegetables for dinner, and then wrote this diary entry, trying very hard not to look at the news.
I hope my mother gets better, although I doubt she will. I hope my country pulls back from the brink of madness, although I doubt that as well. My garden has been I great source of strength to me, as well as a form of insurance in case some emergency disrupts the food supply. But there I go, thinking bad thoughts again. I am tired. And so to bed. Be well, Future Reader.
[1] Though I will crow about Terry Whitt Bailey winning the Democratic primary for the mayoral race last week, which thrilled me immensely.
[2] Fred McFeely Rogers (March 20, 1928 – February 27, 2003) was an American television personality, musician, puppeteer, writer, producer, and Presbyterian minister. He was known as the creator, composer, producer, head writer, showrunner and host of the preschool television series Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood (1968–2001). The show featured Rogers’s kind, neighborly persona, which nurtured his connection to the audience. Rogers would end each program by telling his viewers, “You’ve made this day a special day, by just your being you. There’s no person in the whole world like you; and I like you just the way you are.” (Source: Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.) I grew up watching Fred Rogers’ television show, and believe him to be one of the great moral thinkers of the late 20th century.