I’ve been walking in the desert every morning. It’s silly to be here, and confine myself to her house, the ICU, and one stretch of commercial road when I can drive 2 miles out of my way and hike for hours into a different world.
Because of those walks, and therapy, and my extremely low expectations for this trip I feel much different- less anxious, less angry- just less everything. The world slows down for me out there. I wish I could spend entire days on the trails and never walk into the ICU to hold my mother’s hand while she screams for her own mother.
tomorrow night I’m going to White Sands, and what I hope is that the universe will tell me something profound while I’m out there.
A half-line from a John Prine song is stuck in my head. “A hard way to go” replays about 400 times an hour, John Prine and Bonnie Raitt singing live. Looking at my mother in that bed, doing so much better than even four days ago but with still so much touch and go ahead of her, I think about the loss of dignity, the torture of 46 days in a hospital bed and 60+ left to go, and I think if she doesn’t pull through this, what a hard, hard way to go. I don’t understand this level of suffering and why- just why. Why so much suffering.