Distracted and Irritable, With Short Attention Span

I read my books, and passages describing the Arizona world around me leap out, vivid, while another, more faraway world intrudes via the radio, bringing news of sickness and meetings and riots in other physical places, along with surveillance and interference threats in the placeless world made up, astonishingly, of nothing but pluses and minuses — and all of it, the near and the far, seems less than fully real. 

In a hospital waiting room, perhaps more so in a room in a hospice facility, the world shrinks to the size of that room, expanding only at intervals to extend to corridors and nearby areas, and the passage of time is nothing more than the crawling hands of that clock. But when that room exists almost 2,000 miles away, it shifts in and out of focus, becoming now immediate (without warning), now distant and abstract, almost unimaginable against the immensity of limitless physical surroundings, mountains and desert and sky. 

Meanwhile, in my heart and mind I am neither fully here nor there … do not silence notifications on my cell phone, having told my son to call or text me at any time … pass along bulletins to my sisters as soon as they reach me....

I remember long ago — I was 14 — when a friend’s father died. Her mother, stunned with grief, was also irritable in a way I could not understand at the time. Her house was full of people, all trying to find ways to comfort her, but the loss could not yet have been fully real to her, and while still in shock she had to juggle parental and hostess duties, surrounded by well-meaning neighbors, because whatever happens, life goes on. Meals, errands, sleep (or attempts to sleep) all demand their time. Of course, it all might have been harder without those people there. Who knows? We do not live parallel comparative lives: our personal experience is absolute, the only experience we have. Not better or worse, easier or harder, just what is.

There are stretches of life when minds cannot remain in a single place and when there are few if any comfortable places for them to rest. I am grateful that my son is able to be with his father and others in a calm hospice setting. For myself, a drive up into the mountains gave me brief respite from sadness and confusion.