I'm kind of unbearably sad tonight...I would claim that I don't know the cause of it, but I'm pretty sure it's a combination of spending $3500 to fix my car and reading a novel with a main character who is succumbing to dementia. The car was unexpected because I took it in for a checkup (which it, admittedly, desperately needed, since I get the oil changed regularly but pretty much ignore all other routine maintenance) and they told me they had to replace the power steering rack or some shit. Boo. The book was more expected, since I chose to read it, but it really put me in the worst mood ever....
...and I suppose the reason it put me in the worst mood ever is obvious, since both my grandmothers and one of my great-grandmothers had some pretty serious dementia. Gram Wampler is still alive, but has slipped quite a bit, while Gram Holder passed away in 2004 and my Great-grandma Wampler died while we were in Ukraine, at which point she hadn't been able to speak for years. Tragic.
The book, TURN OF MIND, is really, really good, though; it was written by one of my creative writing teachers at Stanford, and she did a masterful job of capturing the decline in cognitive function and language ability and social skills and all the rest. The narrator is first-person for the most part, told from the perspective of a former orthopedic surgeon who is sliding into dementia and is also suspected of killing her best friend (although she can't remember whether she did or not). And I'm really glad to have read it, but I think it's going to haunt me. And it will probably haunt me because I saw too much of myself in the other characters, who slowly slip away from the main character because they have their own lives and can't stomach having the same fucking conversation over and over and over again, knowing she'll never remember it.
I don't really know what I'm trying to say here. I suppose it will haunt me because it made me think about what my feelings for my grandmothers tell me about who I am, and I'm not sure I like the answer. Is the impatience I feel toward them just my standard defense mechanism, where I've pre-grieved for them years before they're ever gone because it's easier for me to pretend that they're already dead and nothing but a memory? Or is that impatience something colder, more selfish -- a frozen heart, rather than one that can't handle the heat of its emotions? I suspect that my heart is a blocked, simmering volcano, not a frozen wasteland -- but that's probably why I'm struggling with Ellie and Nick right now, since I'm having trouble forcing myself to stay still and listen to all the long-buried emotions that I'm bleeding into their story, when all I want to do is burn everything and move to Thailand and forget that I ever wanted to be a writer, forget that I ever felt anything for anyone, and live in a moment where there are no choices and no divergent paths and no alternate lives that may or may not have been happier than the one I've found myself in.
Sorry, I should have posted a melodrama alert at the beginning. Tomorrow will be better, or at least cheaper, and I will hopefully drag myself out of this black mood (or at least channel it into the end of Nick and Ellie's story, which is fast approaching and would be approaching even faster if I could stop being sad about them). Goodnight!
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