This Demented Life: A Flash Blog

I move between two worlds: the desert, its sharp, crisp edges and the sea, on an island away from the world.

My life has always been this way, a juxtaposed duality. A Gemini, after all. Always two of me in the room.

My desert world is vast and bright and full of present-tense me. I got sober here. A place of new beginnings. I met my husband here, another transplant uprooted from the centuries-old steadfastness of New England.

The island, though. It is full of past-tense me, of ghosts and lives and memories. Yet it is where the journey took me, in a soul-search for a future self I never set out to find.

All my life I have searched for home, a Dorothy lost in an Oz-like existence. I have come to realize that this flawed vision of home as a physical place lies within my own rootstock, not the branches of my family tree.

And as I summon the muse of my mother, who appears so effortlessly when I am writing in her old island studio, I begin to understand, just a little, how words and home are rooted together. How they take on life, breathing their universal breath, how they flow like the brook from the backyard into the cove. How I am merely their conduit from heart to page, through pen and keyboard. How they happen in a place not always confined to a geographic location. How, like a mother’s love, they always, always, start in my heart.

Said he would call you shortly, my father texts from his bed in the cardiac unit. He’s referring to the “hospitalist,” a relatively new term as annoying and ambiguous as the passage of time in a hospital. Thought today or over the weekend for possible discharge.

Could he be any more vague? I respond.

Hospital time. That indeterminately noncommittal measurement of consults and rounds, case updates and test results and discharge dates. In a hospital, time takes on a nonlinear dimension, its flow seemingly in perpetual limbo. In a hospital, time knows no hour.

I’ve entered this dimension before.

I’ve felt that indeterminate uncertainty in the numerous trips to the ER with my mother and father and husband over the past five years. Waiting for calls, for answers, for something, for anything to propel us forward, each time alternating patience and persistence with irritation and anger.

And here I sit, surrounded by old clocks that stopped years ago. Stuck in this time warp of an old farmhouse where my father once lived, unwound like my mother’s descent into dementia. Here, time carelessly unspools, its ebb and flow as unconcerned as the tides in our cove. Because in the end, I realize, life is all about accepting what is.

Last day of August. The sun casts weak shadows on a tepid afternoon. Ahead, a school bus unloads its passengers. A few orange leaves flutter on the windshield. The finality of summer hovering in the air.

We’re on the way to my father’s future.

“Did you know,” he begins, in that drawling professorial voice he likes to use when he’s imparting dad-wisdom, “that the phrase ‘Bucket List’ refers to death?”

I shouldn’t be surprised at his train of thought; after all, he keeps a list entitled “The Departed” on his refrigerator—names of friends and acquaintances who have recently passed away scrawled on a yellow sheet in the shaky penmanship of an octogenarian.

Plus, he’s old. For him, death is closer to reality than something to be feared.

“Bucket,” he went on, “as in ‘kick the bucket.’ As in, to die.” He took a sip from his root beer float.

As far as I know, plans for his immediate future do not include death. To keep the inevitable bucket-kicking at bay, he has finally agreed to move into the assisted living lodge in his senior community. The decline has been fierce this summer: trouble walking, trouble swallowing, intestinal trouble, driving trouble. What is surprising is how remarkably willing my father is to admit his diminishing abilities, to accept the olive branches of help this new community will graciously extend. His stubborn refusal to acknowledge the aging process has been replaced with gratitude. The mule becomes a lamb.

Yes, he’s slowing down, but at 89, he has checked off nearly everything on his bucket list: diving with Jacques Cousteau; arctic exploration in Greenland; publishing three books; sailing every summer for 60 years; traveling the world. Although he’s outlived most of his friends, he’s anxious to meet new ones. To add more items to his Bucket List.

And yes, death is inevitable. But like my husband’s tattooed reminder: Not Today.