Things I can't say

I am with my friend Willa in Catered Care at the Not-Old-Folks-Home.

She no longer speaks. She writes notes like this:

Once life seemed long and tall like a tower. Now it seems small like a dot.

Then I’m with Del in Vista Care. Which means memory – or really, lack of memory — care. On a good day, she remembers me. This isn’t a good day.

Stars look dim and distant and so do her eyes.

Willa writes another note. It says:

Life is a collection of things that cannot be undone and a collection of other things that can’t be done.

Our friend Ron was a minister. Now he can’t recall who-begot-whom.

My friend Tommie says he makes a blessed mess wherever he goes.

Gail says at least it’s blessed.

Tommie describes a martini so strong, “It tastes like being thrown through a window. Or something like that.” I had to put that in quotes.

The former philosophy professor says that description is close enough.

Kate says someone’s father played the guitar like “a whole band dying in a plane crash in 1972.”

Del is being tested. Endlessly. The testers keep getting annoyed. For example, they ask her to count backwards from 100 backwards by 7 and she will say 193.

Then they will give an example like “100, 93, 86,” but she’ll be looking out the window toward birds and sky.

She prefers birds to counting backwards. So do I.

They are testing “comprehension,” “verbal identification,” “ideation,” and “labelling” and she is not doing well.

Kate says you can kicked out of hospice for not dying on time.

The former writer thinks of bots planning celebrations you would like if only you were alive. Then she thinks, but doesn’t say, an attempt to control if you will be remembered and, too, precisely how.

She says, Words work hard. They raise marks and kids and sales and brows and skirts and standards.

The former professor of physics says drily, Speaking of sales, you get $50 off when you spend half a million or more. He continues, One site sports this headline:

WHAT FUNERAL DIRECTORS & CELEBRANTS CAN LEARN FROM PIZZA DELIVERY APPS

Evidently, funeral companies are no longer funeral companies. They are tech companies that deliver funerals.

The former writer thinks but doesn’t say, Words come in a pinch, a jam, a nutshell, a mad rush, a month of Sundays, a eulogy. Tragic and transcendent, too.

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