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mallorys_camera
Happy what-would-be-your-90th-swirl-on-this-merry-go-round-ride. Wherever you are now, Lynn.
###
Around 6 pm, I noticed Stew had called me earlier in the day. Phone hadn’t rung.
I hadn’t planned on calling Stew back, but when I logged on to my phone to see if he’d left me a message, I inadvertently kickstarted a return call.
I immediately terminated it, but Stew must have seen it ‘cause he immediately called back.
###
Stew is by no means unintelligent, but at the best of times, he talks really-really-fast, and when he’s stressed, he talkssofastthatyouliterallycannotunderstandhim.
And he was stressed.
I made out “Annie” and “hospice.”
“Wait, Stew, wait,” I begged. “What?”
Ensued what was basically an hour-and-a-half-long monologue that touched some on the neurotic East Coast Vogel relations but mostly upon “that fucking bitch Alicia” (a sentiment with which I heartily concur) and “that spoiled-rotten bitch Hailey” (ditto.)
The gist of it was that Annie had somehow ended up in the hospital and that the hospital had balked at sending her back to Happy Memory Acres—They probably saw level 2 bed sores, thought I—and instead were sending her to a hospice 30 some miles away from Bend.
So, Annie is officially dying.
“Do you want to go to be with Annie, Stew?” I asked softly.
But no, Stew didn’t want to go to be with Annie because he doesn’t fly, and he can’t drive because he doesn’t have 4-wheel drive, and Bend is currently under 100 feet of snow, and anyway, being with Annie would entail parlaying with Alicia, and he hates that fucking bitch and hopes she rots in hell—
“Stew, Stew, Stew. Wait,” I said. “If you want to be with Annie, we will talk to Ichabod, and he will talk to Alicia—”
Ichabod, being eminently sane, refuses to get drawn into toxic family feuds. Ichabod talks to everyone. In fact, I believe Alicia recently made him a trustee of her estate.
“I’m telling you, Patty, Alicia doesn’t know what’s going on with Annie. She finally called me yesterday morning; she was sitting by Annie’s bedside. At the hospital.
“‘Do you want to talk to her? Here!’ she says and she shoves the phone next to Annie’s ear, and I say, ‘Annie? Annie? It’s Stew, baby. How are you? I love you. Annie? Annie? Say something—
“And Alicia says, ‘Just talk, Stewart’—she always calls me Stewart—‘She can’t talk, and she can’t hear a thing you’re saying, but if you want to say goodbye, just say goodbye—‘”
Stew does a very credible impersonation of Alicia’s weirdly Valley Girl-ish squawk. I wanted to laugh.
“Well, you know, Alicia’s wrong,” I said. “Hearing is the last sense to go. People frequently hear what’s going on around them, even when they’re in a deep coma. And it sounds like saying ‘goodbye’ is premature if they’re transferring her to hospice. So, I’ll just ask again: Do you want to be with Annie?”
“How can I be with Annie? Alicia doesn’t even know where they’re gonna take her—”
Of course, Alicia knows where they’re gonna take her, I thought. Alicia just doesn’t want to tell you.
“She always told me she wanted to die in my arms,” Stew said mournfully. “Just all cuddled up in my arms. The bitch was supposed to call me back this afternoon,” he added bitterly. “Only she didn’t. Of course.”
Well, cut her some slack, I thought. Her mother is dying.
###
At some point, I thought, Well, it doesn’t really matter if Stew’s there or not, does it?
We’re born alone, and we die alone.
In fact, Stew’s presence might even complicate the death: I remembered how Lynn, my mother, could not die while I was in the room; she waited 20 minutes till I was safely back on the road to Monterey.
For years afterward, I raged inwardly about this, took it as one last example of my mother’s utter self-absorption and complete disregard for my feelings.
Until finally, it dawned on me one day: No, you dummy. You tethered her too tightly to this continuum. She couldn’t die while you were in the room; she did not want to leave you. In her own flawed way, she loved you.
Maybe Stew’s presence would tether Annie similarly.
I don’t know.
###
This was the thing I could do for Annie. The one sole gift I could give her: I could provide comfort & support to someone she’d loved for 31 years.
I could listen to him rant and rave incoherently. I could make soothing noises. I could interject comforting homilies at random intervals: It’s never a good idea to hang onto toxic emotions, Stew.
(Would I have to take my own advice? Nah! It’s okay for me to go on hating Alicia!)
Resolved: I will call Stew once a day for the next few weeks.
He’s so very lonely.
###
When I could finally extricate myself from the phone, I was in an odd head space.
I didn’t feel sad.
Because I didn’t feel anything.
But my little psychic transmitters must have been beaming on high because immediately afterward, two people with whom I am enmeshed on the deepest of levels reached out, seemingly at random.
First, my half-sister Jeanna.
And then the Eleanor who is the Friend of My Bosom from college.
These are not people I talk to very often in the usual stream of things.
Jeanna texted me a photo of a painting she’s been working on:
It’s a painting of La Liendre, the ghost town in that deep, deep, deep Gallinas River canyon where time stands still.
This is what the canyon looked like in the real world last time I was there with Ichabod & RTT nine Thanksgivings ago:
But how am I going to get the cats to New Mexico? I thought drowsily when I got done texting with Jeanna.
And then I thought, Huh!
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Date: 2024-01-24 08:35 pm (UTC)You in NM?! I can see it! Bigtime art comms down there, too!
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Date: 2024-01-24 09:12 pm (UTC)And I like Las Vegas, NM—where Jeanna lives—quite a lot. It's the original Vegas, the place where the prairie abruptly stops. Part of the mystic triangle, whose other points are Santa Fe & Taos. Lotta people think it's an absolute dump, which is kind of mystifying to me because I've always found it to be one of those numinous portal places. It's very poor—maybe that's part of it. But then, the whole eastern part of New Mexico is dirt part.
Definitely a big visual art scene. And Jeanna has acquired a museum-quality collection of Native American artifacts from her hikes through that canyon over the years. We would spend days hiking that canyon whenever I visited her—-leave her house early in the morning, drive 20 miles to the dirt road trailhead, and then down, down, down this crazy steep road, to the river.
We'd hunt for arrowheads. It would feel like we'd just been there an hour when it was really 10 hours. Crazy time distortions! The only time those ever happened to me when I was not stoned on acid. 😀
Anyway, New Mexico is a definite relocation possibility. I'd be close to my sister, which would be nice. And just 50 miles from Santa Fe.
And yes, my mother was very beautiful. Though she never believed it.
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Date: 2024-01-24 11:33 pm (UTC)I wish Annie could die in Stew's arms.
--In cat carriers! ... If you go. New Mexico is no further away than CA, right?
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Date: 2024-01-25 11:51 am (UTC)But New Mexico checks off a lot of the boxes.
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Date: 2024-01-25 05:22 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-01-25 11:49 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-01-30 10:30 am (UTC)❤️❤️❤️
I am sorry these times are so strange and hard.
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Date: 2024-01-30 11:25 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-01-31 07:15 am (UTC)I love your care for me, thank you. I don't even need the letter, my heart just fills with peonies to know you would have written it.
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Date: 2024-01-31 02:47 pm (UTC)