If you’ve read this blog for a long time (exactly zero of you), you’ll know I’ve struggled with how my father ignored me for about 19 years. He got dementia and so one day he completely forgot that he was mad about whatever made him mad all those years ago and was happy to see me. All through the pandemic he and my mother, along with the better-half were what you’d call a pod. We hung out and saw each other quite a bit. That time didn’t really make up for those long years of silence, but what else are you going to do but humor a dementia-stricken person.
He died on December 4th.
We’ve been helping my mom get things in order including everything from trimming the bushes around the house to killing the silverfish that were ravishing the paper in the house. She’s doing OK and the silverfish are dying.
Not sure what else to say about this.
I found this quote which is kind of apropos, although not exactly about this subject:
“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke
