For all the jobs I am getting hired for, I might have to change the name of my website from The Video Slab to something more like “My Book About How Mom Died”. That’s what I have mainly been working on. One can only send in so many job applications and not get hired for so many obviously natural job fits…before you just acknowledge something different is planned for you. I now live in a UNESCO City of Literature. I have an entire book to copyedit before I start hunting for literary agents. So, yeah. It seems like the writing is on the historical building’s walls…it’s time to finally finish this book. That’s what I am working on. While the HR people either add or subtract my wide ranging life on paper from their slush piles, I am perfecting this book about my time as mom’s caregiver during the hardest year of my life. It’s a pretty wild experience.

Copyediting nearly a year’s worth of journal entries, 4 years after that worst year of your life is ummm…fuck. I dunno. Different conflicting things. It’s enlightening. Refreshing. Shocking. I read what is there and I don’t understand how I survived it on an actual literal level. When 60% of caregivers for people with dementia die before the person with the illness does…I have no idea how I am still alive.

Snapshot from a portion I was just editing:

“Update 2 PM  – Hospital waiting room at the UVA Radiation Clinic

We arrive at the Rad clinic just in time to see the guy walking out of his treatment who always wears his “Real Men Rock Pink”. He’s  been here I think every day that we’ve been. He also wears a pink baseball hat and pink Nike’s. I say this all like we’ve been doing this for months. We already feel like veterans. This is only our 6th day in the  Radiology clinic. Also…why can’t my mom be THAT guy? Fired up. Facing the facts. Embracing the suck and getting it done with flair. That’s the mom I wanted to have. That’s the role model I needed.

It’s not an exaggeration to say it feels like we’ve been at this forever  already, like we’ve seen pink shirt guy 100 times by now. He’s like the seating arrangement we already take for granted in this subterranean waiting room. These places have a time bending effect. Time  moves slower down here, beneath street level…in the  basement of the hospital-where people get irradiated, get sicker and pray for miracles. 

You hear the shusshing of the piped in air.  You hear the occasional beep of someone’s phone, reminding you that  somewhere out there, there are people, without cancer, sending messages, to us  unfortunates, way way way down here. Nurses walk in and out, you hear the swishing of their clothing. The bored person behind the reception desk has three fingers pushing into her cheek, elbow on the desk,  probably checking her Facebook.”

Besides the book? I exercise a lot. My son and I have a deal going where we go the gym Monday – Friday. I go into a local park to walk at night just about everyday. I hit up local coffee shops and diners. I hang out with both kids whenever they have decided I am not annoying them 🙂

I read history books. Just picked up a new memoir. I saw the author give a talk last night. So I will be diving into that today, in my hammock, swinging somewhere in the wooded park.

Probably my favorite thing, besides being with my children, is walking through a graveyard on the way to the park. It’s a large one. It’s got style, somehow. It says a little something more about the dignity of death in the way the land lays with the trees and site stones in agreement of some kind. Walking through it in darkness and alone always feels like a powerful metaphor.

Hey…hey Charlie. Are you afraid of death? Walking through a large cemetery at night makes one wonder. The ghosts of all those people. Are they here? What I do, is invite them to show me something. After all, they have been where I am. They have walked around and wondered about how to make a living, about how to tell their stories, about how to be a good person. All of these headstones know more about life than I do. Before I join them in the ground, I just hope I can do so knowing I did things in a good way.

The “BLACK ANGEL” from the Oakland Cemetery in Iowa City.