Flocks

From Tuesday through Thursday afternoon, I was in Montreal checking on our apartment and getting the stitches removed from my dental surgery of a few weeks ago. Feels better! Late yesterday afternoon I drove back, and stopped the car along the stubble-filled cornfields just north of Lake Champlain to watch clouds of snow geese wheeling and settling among their darker Canadian brethren. I have a thing about snow geese, not for any particular reason except that they seem particularly beautiful to me, and until recently, have been relatively rare in the parts of the country where I've lived. Oddly enough, on the way up to Canada this time, I saw a flock of snow buntings in the same field: much smaller, but equally special.

My brother-in-law and his wife took over the care of my father-in-law for a week, starting last Monday. So I hadn't seen him for three days, and when I visited today, he didn't really recognize me, and this evening my husband felt the same was true for him. It's painful, but we expected it. He can only process so many faces amid the comings and goings, and he seemed to be confusing us with my in-laws. That may change again next week; who knows. He is eating more than he was, and still able to get up; in fact last night he had a shower. And although some family members insist otherwise, he told me today, quite matter-of-factly, "I'm not getting better." Mentally I think he is less "there" than he was three days ago; the bandwidth seems less, the processing and connecting weaker. But while he doesn't seem likely to get up and around again, clearly we are not looking at an immediate demise; he could go on like this for some time. So our family has engaged the services of a caregiver agency and will be working out a schedule to provide round-the-clock care in conjunction with nursing from the facility where he lives. We are going to be staying down here much more than we were, at least until we see how this goes and how he reacts.

There was something almost exhilarating about his precipitous decline at first: so much to do, so many adjustments to make, so many emotional and physical demands that we became completely absorbed and focussed on the person needing care.  Now, having stepped back into a secondary role, and looking at all the other neglected work that now has to somehow get done, I finally feel the exhaustion as well as a pull back toward normal life. The fatigue comes not only from cumulative sleep deprivation and that inevitable let-down after intense events, but from dealing with family dynamics and the awareness of different members' simultaneously-existing views of reality, with my father-in-law's altered world at the center. "When I first became sick I thought I was still at the school where I had taught," he said. "Now I know that's not right...but still, I can't quite make out where I am."

It's perhaps appropriate that my current reading is Arnaud Desjardin's Un grain de sagesse. Whether talking about the spiritual path in terms of educating children, or growing in our own awareness, he speaks often about the difference between living in "my world" and in "the world". And long before our bodies intervene, imposing biological disorder, we persist in creating worlds of our own, with their complex invented realities. Part of maturity, Desjardins points out, is the ability to see and accept things as they really are, not as we wish them to be, as well as moving from a "me"-centric view to one where "les autres" are the focus.

Maybe that's why I felt compelled to stop the car and watch the flocks of geese who, at that moment, crossed my own southward path as they moved north. And it's not one, or several, but the host of black-tipped, white wings that transcends individuality to become something so beautiful, so poignant, so mysterious that your breath catches in your throat and you somehow feel your own restlessness, your own self rising along with them, drawn inexorably toward some destination that could be seen, maybe, if you could only fly high enough.

Comments

[Julia]

Beth. I find your posts so deeply thought-provoking, sad and yet, in some way, kind of reassuring.
We seem to find it so hard to handle death, so difficult to talk about it, let alone face it, and yet it is the one inevitability in this crazy, fast-moving, confusing world. Reading your account of your father-in-law's illness is deeply moving but comforting. And no, I tried and failed to express it better than that, je m'excuse

[zuleme]

One year my husband and I and a friend went up to a place on the Saint Lawrence to watch the snow geese migrate. It was like being at an airport. Groups would come in and settle down and others take off. There was a museum there about the geese. It was a campground so we stayed there and watched all day.
Funny thing though, there were also hunting blinds set up and people would come (I guess there's a season) and shoot them. We thought that was somewhat bizarre.
But the geese were lovely.

[Lucy]

Be gentle with yourself, Beth, and remember sometimes to rest in the flight of geese, and other such things...

[Dave]

I've watched several books unfold on blogs, now, but this one is still the most interesting to me because I know the author has no idea what the next chapter will be like... and of course because the central character is such a charmer. But I love how you've brought in the snow geese here.

Hang in there.

[Vivian]

I have been wanting to post here but not sure how, a drawing of Paul Celan that hangs in my office. Circling his head are the words of this quote of his from Malebranche, "Attention is the natural prayer of the soul." I think of this more and more when I read your recent posts.

[Neath]

This morning I had a sad experience. I was standing in a spot where I had a view of the new construction on the west side of Dorval Golf (northwest of airport) and I saw 2 geese fly quickly by me going west. Well, the construction is replacing a man made lake that used to be frequented by geese on their migrations. 45 minutes later you could see one of those glorious V formations of geese flying east overhead just going into the distance. The sad part was the thought that the two geese I had seen earlier were "scouts" and had to tell the flock that they couldn't stop in this place anymore.

[Neath]

This morning I had a sad experience. I was standing in a spot where I had a view of the new construction on the west side of Dorval Golf (northwest of airport) and I saw 2 geese fly quickly by me going west. Well, the construction is replacing a man made lake that used to be frequented by geese on their migrations. 45 minutes later you could see one of those glorious V formations of geese flying east overhead just going into the distance. The sad part was the thought that the two geese I had seen earlier were "scouts" and had to tell the flock that they couldn't stop in this place anymore.