The Whole Of The Moon

I saw the rain dirty valley
You saw Brigadoon
I saw the crescent
You saw the whole of the moon 

--from The Whole of the Moon by Mike Scott

This Life Is A Journey

Everyday is a gift, life is a journey.  Trite clichés.  Or so I thought.  It's all in focus now, more than when I watched other people dying.  I feel an overwhelming sense of guilt, having mourned so many in the past, without fully appreciating the loss.  I lost my best friend when I was 17, when I barely understood death. It all became quite clear, or so I thought, with that loss.  Untrue.  Then, I started losing friends and campers from MDA camp.  And that was a different kind of loss.  Except, it wasn't. Watching a child die, I thought, was perhaps the worst thing I could experience. 

Harvest Moon over the Palouse

Then I lost my  uncle.  Then my mother, and the parents of friends. Each loss allowed me to erect a facade of reckoning. There were more losses in between.  Life is so common, and yet so fragile, that there are deaths of people we know that are interstitial.  In between other losses.  The holy shit, Calen died. What the fuck, Robert died.  Kirk killed himself.  Speed bumps of loss.  Not unimportant, in fact signal, just death that happens between the losses that mark us more deeply.

Now, Jenny is dying.  More slowly than most with this disease, thankfully.  And we have a terrible relationship on paper.  She loves someone else. I always write that to remind myself, not you.  I live the day-to-day. Jenny isn't some Bette Davis or Joan Crawford, hell bent on causing me misery.  I don't defend or even understand what she did/is doing.  It fills my dreams, wakes me in the night, causes me more grief than my meager words can describe. But she can be kind to me, and life can feel so normal, and when she has a health crisis, we are pulled together like a spring-loaded trap.  I am protecting her from a feral dog, or so it feels.  I drive like a bank robber on California freeways speeding for the helicopter cameras, to get her to the hospital.  I hold her hand and soldier through the fear, the pain, the weight of this disease.  I clown when we are alone, to make her smile, to ward off the fear.  I beg the doctor not to tell her that she is dying more quickly than she thought.  I cry with her when she gets the news.  And the pain, the joy and the suffering, I savor every moment.  I savor every single moment.  How can this be happening?  

So, I am watching death follow her every step, and lick its lips in anticipation.  Maybe death isn't a feral dog, but a feral cat, playing with Jenny like a mouse it has captured, letting go for sport for short bursts of time, just to bounce again so it can carry it around in its bloody maw for a while longer, stretching out the game. 

So, every day is bleak Christmas, I can't change that, so I will just open each moment like a gift I don't like, but what is the alternative?