12.15.03 - 1:07 p.m.

Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold:

The sea is calm tonight.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; - on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Aegaean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Mom's hair is falling out. Everywhere. It's one thing to imagine the eventuality, and plan for it. It seems easy, doesn't it? Or, almost easy: difficult but do-able, one of those things you can tough out, brave your suffering, embrace it. It doesn't work that way. It's just sad, and a little gross, and more than a little heartbreaking, any way you look at it. Maybe it would be easier to shave your head - no hair on the pillow, the chair, in the food, clogging the drain.

I'm so tired. I'm exhausted, emotionally and physically. It was a very long weekend, and I think I climbed the equivalent of a hike up Everest cleaning out my grandmother's house. Despite several long sessions of cleaning things out, there was still plenty of stuff in the house, including furniture, paintings, and weird little piles of different things - like an enormous stack of Mad Magazines from the late 60s and early 70s. I wanted somebody to take them (someone other than me), but no one would. We threw the Mad Magazines away, along with stacks of linens, gobs of wire hangers, and an astonishing amount of furniture. When the St. Vincent de Paul people refused to take any household goods and took hardly any furniture, I thought we were going to end up throwing away even more stuff: the Lego monorail set, the original 1950s Lincoln Logs, with the 1960s expansion pack, the horrible Aunt Jemima figurine that served as a doorstop in the little bedroom. (Actually, we did throw that away. No one wanted it, and we didn't want to give it to Goodwill. It's racist, and it always bothered me, seeing that at Grandma's house.) We threw away the top of the roaster, which we used to cook Thanksgiving dinner for who knows how long. The rest of the time, it served as a bread-and-chip keeper. I took the living room furniture - what was left of it - the kitchen table and chairs, a bed, some garden tools, some other tools, some lamps, the TV stand, the sewing machine, the beer glasses, some plant stands and some porch furniture and the porch swing. My dad took a mattress and box spring and the dresser from Grandma's room, although it looks like I'll end up with the dresser because it's too big for the spot in their room. I also grabbed some paintings that they were going to give to goodwill - the one Grandma picked out in Ireland (I was surprised: I'd wanted that painting, but I was sure someone else would have wanted it. Apparently, no one else remembered that Grandma got that painting in Ireland.) - as well as some others, including this sort of ugly - (also, dirty and in some disrepair) - oil painting that my grandmother's father's cousin painted for her (or, maybe, my great-grandfather) in the 1920s.

That was the work, those are the things, and there's something satisfying about seeing them stacked up in the storage locker, ready for when I move into my new house. All that stuff: mine. All that stuff, all snug in the little storage area: mine mine mine. It just fits, although Dad said that we could have put a good bit more in the storage locker if we had taken the time to pack it. We didn't: a six hour drive through snow in this monstrously large truck (the seat was higher than my head when I was standing on the ground: we had to drive through the weigh stations), then an hour unpacking the truck in bitter cold, windy weather, with snow a-flying through the air. By the time we were done, my whole face was numb and it felt like it was cracking when I finally got into the car and started to warm up. Driving back home after that, we saw at least six accidents over twenty miles of interstate highway, all thanks to roads slippery from snow.

So there was the work, and then there was the rest of it. As we were heading out to lunch, we saw Mrs. Lamont, my grandmother's neighbor, in her driveway. Mrs. Lamont has always sort of been there. She was my grandmother's best friend, and a big part of our lives. Certainly, she was a bigger part of the lives of my youngest aunt and uncle, who grew up in Altoona and are good friends with her children, but... man. My aunt was talking to her, and I couldn't say anything because I was doing absolutely everything in my power not to cry. I'm crying now just thinking about it.

There's more than that, of course, but it's so hard to put the loss into words. I suppose it's impossible to record the genuine texture of any real loss, each absence is a thing unto itself, and there are so many absences wrapped altogether in this one. Places are important: they ground you, root you in the larger world. There's a rich identity, a half-hundred different layers of awareness, the physical memory of the light, the sweep of the valley, the places you've been and the person you've been in those places, sense-memories that evoke more than images, but feelings, exquisite in their complexity. Even when you share them, you can't share them. No one else really cares about them, not as much as you do. For the most part, no one gives a damn.

Now, I'm going to stop writing this so I can hopefully stop crying so I can eat my lunch and get back to work.