"We were standing by peaceful water"

Saturday, our daughter's 9 a.m. piano recital, a return to our apartment with a few groceries and time for work and chores, the way that a person half undoes their dress-up clothes and lounges at home, an open window in the kitchen, a freshly wiped table, a curtain blowing, my afternoon cup of coffee. WXRT played John Prine's "Lake Marie."

A rush. To remember that the great sadness might be the lack of return. Or. To constantly forget that. Or is the great sadness the utter failure of memory or anyway neither is true or real. 

My mother and I liked that John Prine song around 1995.

The line about blood, as shadows, in black and white video, reminds me of my brother's 1990s t-shirts.

It's been over two months since the start of a major medical drama that will become one of the primary strands of our family lore. I took notes in March for that. While driving to a suburban hospital. While listening to a fairly engaging book about Eve Babitz with a fairly bad recording of the portion in which Babitz's own sentences are quoted. Now I think that Babitz's obsession with gossip and overcoming nasty east coast attitudes about Californian provincialism might be useful to thinking through a problem of defunded state universities and pedagogy. Now I think that the body collapses in such an unwieldy way that the lack of return is more poignant than ever. 

March

“First, my father died. Then . . . My father died again.” This is from Lucie Brock-Broido, who is actually writing about the way that a death causes the rupture of old-death into thinking and being. The actual language is “First, my father died. Then my mother/ Did. My father died again.” My tweaking of it loses the clever "Did" and alters the whole utterance, the whole thing. I know. 

But when I first read that, a long time ago, I thought that it was preparing me for the future death of my stepfather, who became a dad to me in my twenties, after he and my mother met in a grief group, after the death of my father, after the death of my stepfather's wife. And when I read it, such a death seemed very, very far away. 

To be clear: my stepfather is not dead. He may or may not be actively dying. He may be recovering from a surgery. He may be re-learning to walk. The doctors' various institutional ways of saying "treatable but not curable" or "not curable but treatable" are all the same kind of rupture.

He's very sick or He was very sick for two weeks and now something else or: who is not, basically, very sick? There are CT scans, MRIs, brain surgeries, hand exercises, a TV playing in a cramped and awful room, ICU rules; there was an ambulance and intubation and sedation and a seizure and standing around an ER in complete panic and watching my mother re-experience the trauma of my dad's death and my brother the same--and their secret shared experience of that is unknowable to me.

In the day after the brain surgery, which was, I guess, part two or three of this drama, my mother kept calling him by my dad's name.

My stepdad and I, in our little blue paper masks, made eye contact.

Was it sympathy, empathy, for how she is in her own trauma tunnel? Was our shared acknowledgement something close to comfort itself?

My stepdad is certain kind of person who doesn't really exist anymore. The product of a mixed-class-marriage (genteel mid-level wealth & rural and eccentric working-class family ethos), he's an autodidact and always held a working-class job. He is both deeply eccentric and gentlemanly. 

As I became an adult, he became my dad. It is a special and uncommon experience to become known by someone who does earnestly try to see you as a person in-flux, rather than as the child whom they knew all along.

That's as far as I got. To quote Andre 3000 on The Love Below.

I want to return to a lake to which I've never been.

I want a series of domestic portraits-in-writing, always family members standing (or holding on to a walker, as the case may be) at bodies of water. Gloomy mirrors that look up to nothing and drip with the blood of remembering.