All this goodbye without going away...

Two things I had floating around in my drafts folder were things I wanted to revisit and remember for whatever reason. In keeping with having at least one thing in my life organized and in the interest of prepping this blog for both Blog Every Day December and the 200th post (!) I thought I'd just post the two things here. The first is an excerpt from David Rakoff's swan song "Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish" which is a novel written entirely in verse and written while Rakoff was dying. This brief excerpt is in the voice of one character who is caring for his mother as she dies of Alzheimer's disease. I'm currently witnessing the "dispiriting coda" of my own grandmother in this way and when I read it, I could almost hear the words echo off the walls of every chamber of my heart and all three parts of my brain, particularly "All this goodbye without going away."


"Like a time-lapse filmed flower that blooms in reverse,
Each day brought some further cruel deforestation
Of mind, with no hope for one thought's restoration.
 He'd thought that her being alive  would defray
His sadness, but all this goodbye without going away
This brutal, unsightly, and cold disappearing
Was so beyond what he'd conceived ever fearing
A stupid, but no less dispiriting coda
to be slapped by his mother, who wanted his soda
This someone he'd loved and so viscerally known...
It left Josh abandoned and feeling alone.
More than his mother uncensored, unkempt,
Was the non-recognition. Her blanket contempt
Made him feel like they'd never met, wholly a foreigner,
Meriting no more regard than the plant in the corner.
This being stranger was like being dead,
And brought to mind how, in a book he had read
That most folks misunderstood one common state:
The flip side of love is indifference, not hate."


The second thing I came across awhile ago, when I still had a twitter account, was this tweet from Sherman Alexie:

Ocassionally, when someone asks how I am, I tell them the truth: always hungry, often lonely.

 
One of the things I do miss about twitter is the off chance that somewhere in the sludge there is always the possibility of truth. And sometimes that truth is told so succinctly and honestly that seems even truer, as though that were a possibility.