The Old Woman In Hiding

First let me say that today was, for those who don't mind cold and raining, magnificent. The birds were skipping from tree to tree like flat rocks across a pond.

That's the upbeat part of this post. Now let me makes some random observations about life. Or death, which is the same thing. It's like this. I make a joke of being the Old Woman with Walker. But the walker is not a joke. It's real. I use it because I can't walk across the room more than about three times without it. I work it for the astonishment and sympathy people afford me. I decorate like every day is fiesta. I use it to carry things; that's convenient. But on the whole, it sucks using a walker. But nobody wants to know that. Nobody wants to see that. I make them see the walker by making it a joke.

Likewise, nobody wants to hear that I'm at a place in life when I count the past by the time I may have left. Sure, I'm not old old. But I'm in, at best, the last quarter of my life. And I don't want to hear "You're only as old as you feel", because guess what, boys and girls, the Woman with Walker feels old. And I don't see any percentage in trying not to feel how I feel. I mean, I'm not gonna die of it. But I am gonna die. Yeah, yeah, I know. Everybody's gonna die sometime. But I'm gonna die sometime relatively soon. That scares me. It pisses me off. It intrigues me. So if there's anybody out there who feels that way, or wants to hear how that feels, I'd like to talk about it.

The First Day of the End of My Life

I wasn't home the day Dylan died on the living room couch. Leila, who was visiting, had been in and out all day. She had made several trips to the hospital to see me. I was due to come home the next day with my new titanium knee. Early in the evening she called to ask how to change the way Dylan had the stereo/TV set up. He had been playing with his X-box; she just wanted to watch TV, and hear it. I couldn't explain it over the phone, so I told her to ask Dylan. "He's asleep," she said. "Well, wake him up," I said. I heard her call his name a couple of times; then she came back to the phone and said, "He's not okay. I need to call EMS." She promised to call back, but after what seemed a long time she hadn't. So I called the apartment. "Ginger, he's not okay," she said. "He's dead." Just like that--he's not okay, he's dead. We had some kind of conversation after that and then I hung up the phone and started to scream.
Later I found out that while she waited for EMS Leila sat holding his cold hand and stroking his cold face and scolding him for leaving me. When the paramedics got there and confirmed that he was surely dead and had been for some time, she still tried to persuade them to try resuscitation. For months any time her hand felt cold she remembered that time holding Dylan's cold hand and stroking his cold face.

The Coroner's Office didn't think he meant to die. They called it an accidental overdose. He had a heart condition neither of us was aware of and, according to his best friend, whom I trust, heroin was a new drug to him. He just made a mistake.

I of course never saw him dead on my couch. When I did see him at the funeral home several days later, because we did not have him "prepared" for public viewing, his scalp had not been sewed up after autopsy. So they had a towel, golden in color, wrapped around his head. It fell about his face at angles, making him look like a pharaoh. He had a devilish little smile on his face that seemed to say, "I know something you don't, Mom." The undertaker assured me that he had not altered Dylan's face since he came from the Coroner's office, that that was in fact the expression he bore when he died. It figures. He always liked to have one over on his Mom.

I lived on the couch for months while I recovered from knee surgery.

I love him. I live.