Pop

I am going through my morning blogging-rounds as though today is just another happily ordinary day, when, in fact, yesterday very well might have been our last good day.

Last night, at about two in the morning, I awoke to a strange noise, like something important falling down. I thought it was the cats. Then I heard Pop’s voice. I got up to see what was going on. Pop is stumbling around in his underwear briefs, muttering to himself. The only speech I can make out: “I can’t believe it.”

I ask, “What can’t you believe?” He says, “I told you.” He never does answer. He then says something about the bathroom. I am thinking that he cannot find the toilet, that he is really out of his mind. I guide him back to his room and into his bathroom.

This has never happened before. I am praying that this is just a terrible lapse and he will bounce back in the morning. Yet, we are supposed to get groceries today, and I am very doubtful that this is going to happen. I cannot imagine him driving a car.

Later in the night, I can hear him in his bedroom muttering some more. I hear the name Theresa. He says, “I'm sorry. I tried.” He is obviously feeling guilty, presumably over the suicide. This is the first time that I have ever seen any indication of this. I had noticed that he always seemed averse to the subject of Mother and would turn away and ignore it whenever I mention her. I now wonder whether he was just repressing very hard.

He was drinking last night, and I am hoping that that is the main problem, and that life will go back to normal, at least for another few years, but I don’t think I could bet big money on that.

And I am still chasing sleep...

1790s George Washington

Even though the politicos were polarized, everyone agreed, when it came to the second election of the new republic, George Washington had to retain his place at the helm. The country needed some more solid years to stabilize, before it could tackle more serious political contests for power.

<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

Even as their feud worsened, both Hamilton and Jefferson pleaded with Washington to stand for a second term as president. It may have been the sole thing that now united these sworn antagonists. Both men knew their personal warfare could wreck the still fragile union and thought Washington the one man who could hold it together. “North and South will hang together if they have you to hang on,” Jefferson told the president.

-- Ron Chernow, “Alexander Hamilton”

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Pop

So far, the ‘just ignore it and maybe it will go away’ routine seems to be working. We did not even leave that late to get our groceries. He seems a little chastened, as though he does remember at least some of his midnight hysterics, but other than that, it is life as usual.

I will take every day that I can get, but it does feel like that is the appropriate unit of measure: days. One certainly cannot think in terms of years. Maybe I am coming to be comfortable with this hard truth. After all, what am I doing with my life? It should not be that hard to see it go.

How many people will mourn my loss and treasure my memory? There are only the cats, and they will miss only the food, though my heart still goes out to them.

"Is Life a Ponzi Scheme?"

“A free man thinks of nothing less than of death, and his wisdom is a meditation not on death, but on life.”

-- Spinoza

We're going to catch a few notes from Mark Johnston's book review of Samuel Scheffler Death and the Afterlife. This is not the 'afterlife' of our soul or consciousness that proceeds on after our body's demise. This is not Christian or religious:

In Scheffler’s self-consciously idiosyncratic use of the term, the “afterlife” is neither a supernatural continuation of this life, nor the result of a deeper naturalistic understanding of the kind of thing we are; it is what John Stuart Mill called “the onward rush of mankind,” the collective life of humanity after our individual deaths. Scheffler’s thesis is that the onward rush of humankind—the collective afterlife—is much more important to us than we are ordinarily apt to notice.

The issue is thus: "Do we need to believe humanity will continue after our deaths?" We are bid to look at the scenario conjured in P. D. James's "Children of Men", in which all of the planet's humanity ceases to be able to have children in a crisis of infertility. Even if such a crisis were a few generations off, would it not somehow make our lives and our efforts that much more meaningless?

Notice that this issue arguably has greater saliency in light of our generation's very conscious concern about Global Warming, that sense of a great crisis brewing, of a terrible ending, if not to all humanity, then perhaps to civilization. Mr. Johnston's discussion is worth the read, though he essentially comes back to the basic zen answer: we have this moment, sharing it together, you and me, and isn't that meaningful enough?

[Source: Mark Johnston at Boston Review.net]

Emergencies

As I am taking the trash and recyclables out, some emergency vehicles come racing through the neighborhood with their sirens blasting. It occurs to me that I was actually pretty close to needing to call them last night myself. If Pop had fallen to the floor, even if just in a heavy daze, being unable to get up by himself or to recognize anything, I probably would have had to call them.