I Guess I Need The Eggs

It was great seeing my old patient again, ("old" meaning from fifteen years ago)....catching up on her Life and listening to her gorgeous language. Some people simply say the most unexpected things, especially when they aren't thinking ahead about whatever it is they are just about to say. When we allow ourselves to just open up and talk, the world expands.

"Don't you think it odd that my husband refers to my mother as "that animal lady" simply because she owns two dogs? And on the other hand there he goes and says words I don't know what they mean, like 'salacious' or 'excrescent'. If I went by what my friends say, I'd hate him. They think it's scary that he says he "loves me to death", they think he means it. When they start complaining too much about him I pus on my big voice and make them smaller. What do you think it means, though, to love somebody to death? I would think that when it comes to day to day functioning, it would stop you in your tracks."

Ah, Life.

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"Yes, the story I am writing exists, written in absolutly perfect fashion, some place, in air. All I must do is find it and copy it."
- Jules Renard
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I remember the morning my late husband Jim woke up from a dream and said outloud, "Oh, it is really nothing. I am just practicing my freedoms."

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Well tell each other (Jim's daughters and me) that we miss Jim more and more, instead of less and less. He was our iron bar, he was our windowpane, he was our four o'clock in the afternoon. Who knows what happens inside memory when we remember someone we loved who has died? Are we remembering how it felt to be "ourselves", loving that person.....or are we remembering "that" person? Just because one can see someone in their mind's eye does not mean they are remembering that person.....oh, but who knows? Forty-four years of marriage is a long time, although only a blip in Jim's sense of paleontologic time. In human time, though forty-four years is a rather long trajectory leading up, or rather down, down, down, to death.

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"You can't say everything, that's true enough," wrote Simone de Beauvior, in her THE MANDARINS, "but nevertheless you can try to get across the real flavor of a life. Every life has a flavor, a flavor all its own, and if you can't describe it, there's no point in writing."

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"It is not a very good life to be a dead person."
- Pip, the author Helen Bevingtn's grandson, when he was five

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And yet, for some people, it is not a very good life to be a live person. Depressed people will often say that, while they have no idea what happens after life's end, they devoutly hope it is not more Life. As for me, I want to live a thousand more years, at least as long as I could keep my skin and my hair. Well, my facial skin and the hair on my head. The rest can go. Or smooth out. Both my parents died by the time I was 34 and Jim died two years and four months ago, but I have never felt their presence after death. Well, maybe a nudge once, with Jim, but I was sleeping with his ashes, which were encapsulated (wrapped up very well indeed) inside a series of plastic bags and silk scarves, and I think I rolled over on him much too abruptly. For the most part, I think Life loves Life. At least, that is what I think, these days.
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"....It was great seeing Annie again and I realized what a terrific person she was and how much fun it was knowing her and I thought of that old joke, you know, this, this, this guy goes to a psychiatrist and says, Doc, uh, my brother's crazy, he thinks he's a chicken and, uh, the doctor says, well why don't you turn him in? And the guy says, I would, but I need the eggs. Well, I guess that's pretty much how I feel about relationships. You know, they're totally irrational and crazy and absurd and, but uh, I guess we keep going through it...because...most of us need the eggs."
-last lines in Woody Allen's ANNIE HALL