Usually when I sit down to write the words just pour out. For my substack especially, I sit down and rip out something from the frothy head of whatever weird interface there is between my unconscious and non-unconscious “mind,” both of which I’ve always taken to reside in my fingertips.
Four nights or a million years ago I slept in my car at a campsite in the Sacramento Pass, just off highway 50, in eastern Nevada. The sky went wild: a small lonely cloud hung low directly over me, softly rumbling, it dropped a single silent lightning bolt into a nearby field; to the west a great golden cloud opened up like a rift in the sky; to the south a snowy mountain top glowed red, while to north the last rays of the sun illuminated a rocky outcrop, a bright white cloud with an underside hidden in shadow dropped a short rainbow down onto it; two more rainbows mirrored each other where the rift had been, the eastern valley darkening behind it. I turned around and around, only gently vertiginous: above the red mountain the blue-black night sky began to open, the moon appearing tiny high above it; back above the rocks the cloud had somehow developed blood-red fingers that reached down to touch where the rainbow had been; and looking up the lonely cloud was gone, now a window into the few starts above it, ringed with blood red clouds bordered with gold. It was impossibly still; my footfalls on the rocky soil were deafening and I tried not to move.
The following night I stayed in a hotel by the creek in Idaho Springs, Colorado. I couldn’t sleep, so I tried writing something, but I couldn’t, so I packed up the car and left early.
I got home around 2:30 in the afternoon, and was able to spend my dad’s last twenty four hours with him— four of them in involuntary sleep on the sofa. That was yesterday or a million years ago— I’m not convinced the distinction is necessarily of value.
This morning we began the task of funeraling; tomorrow we begin the task of accounting for and attending to all of mom and dad’s stuff. Everything here has a story and means something to somebody; forms some special connection, figures a relation, to mom and dad— has a home here and a home somewhere else, in a past and in a future.
For now it’s just me and Dad’s cat, Loki. I’m not sure if he realizes that Dad is gone; if he got used to him being in the hospital and expects him back, or if he knows and sees things the way some people say animals (especially cats) do. He cuddled with me on the sofa last night, and was welcome company in the surreal world of my mom and dad’s house without my mom and dad.
It’s probably going to be a long August, and it’s going to be hard, but it is already marbled with mysterious blessings. If you’d like to add to those blessings, I could really use the help and I would really appreciate it. Every night and morning I read the list of folks who have helped already, like a prayer, and I think about the necessary non-distinction between these acts (giving, blessing, praying) and the miracle phenomenon of “making things happen,” especially in the face of terrible odds, which I suppose is one way to think of hardship, of suffering in life, in general.
Which is to say: thank you, and bless you. More soon XOXO