Dead Letter Department #107

I have, since last we met, finished re-reading both the Ancillary Justice & the Murderbot series, which I lined up on my shelf & tore through, one after another. I think this is only my second time re-reading the Ancillary books all the way through together, although I probably revisited the first one when the second came out, & so on, & it was my third time taking the complete Murderbot circuit.

I only realized about halfway through why it seemed so important to pour my brain into those worlds: first, of course, they’re both very, very good, in extremely different ways. Ancillary is a master class in revenge, Murderbot is one in recovery, essentially, eventually. Ancillary is incredibly intricate, in a delicious, world rolling out around you way. Murderbot feels simpler, but only at first, and that’s largely because of Murderbot itself’s way of winnowing things down to understandable input. Second, I’ve been thinking a lot about memory, and how faulty memory can make you feel like (or be treated like) not-a-person. I am always to some degree thinking about this, but more so these days, I guess.

Saturday was the first warm weekend day of the year & I forget every time how suddenly people spring out of their houses, onto the trails & into the park, & most relevantly in this case, into the breweries. I went to Structures, downtown, where a couple of weeks ago the parking was abundant & the bar was lightly populated, but on Saturday my friend P. ended up circling in her car for quite some time & we found ourselves under the big tent in the back, rather than on the side deck, where they had not yet managed to unearth enough of the outside chairs for all the people who wanted to sit out there. The fried chicken sandwich & home made potato chips were excellent, the company was better.

It was good to go lay a fresh association over the place, which was where another friend had taken me out to celebrate my name change when my dad was in memory care, & I was multiple beers in, getting the call that he was declining fast, & I should come while I still could.

I’ve been gradually trying to go to the places where all that stuff happened, at least the ones that I don’t want to lose by accidentally turning them into untouchable sites that I can’t visit again: the coffee place I took him for the best mochas in town, the walks, the restaurants. It’s not going particularly well, to be honest, & the drive to Lynden, which I was on every other day for a while there, has ended up being one of the worst. Unfortunate, since one of my best friends lives there, & I go semi-regularly.

It’s been driving me crazy that I don’t have any recordings of my dad’s voice. I realized the other day that this is at least partially a generational thing—if I was a few years younger, I probably would have thought to take video at events, or just for myself, but I am old enough that memory keeping usually = photos. I’d gone through the deleted voicemails on my phone several times, but the only thing I could find was a little six second fragment of him saying something incoherent into my voicemail—this was during the days right before memory care, when he was constantly distressed, & calling because he did not recognize his wife—before he hung up.

Last night, it suddenly occurred to me that my old phone might not have wiped out the deleted voicemails yet, since it had been turned off for months, so I got out of bed at midnight, found it in a drawer, booted it up, cracked back & all, & carefully went through dozens of old messages. My dad & his wife shared their phones back & forth interchangeably, so most of what I found ended up being logistical conversations she & I were having as his abilities tanked & his needs abruptly increased, especially in the weeks before the memory care facility, but finally there it was: almost two minutes.

It was left for me when he was, again, distressed, convinced he was at home with no one taking care of him, despite the constant presence of his wife & often her friends, and needed me to come over. He’d already lost some grip on language, so the words aren’t quite in the right order, or used in a way that made sense, & it devolves, about forty seconds in, into a bit of a philosophical aside, but it’s there, his cadence, his voice. He remembered me, remembered he could call me for help. I didn’t even listen to the whole thing—I just used it to sharpen my own memory. Yes, this is what he sounded like that, this was the particular way he spoke, this was my father.

I saved it in three places. I didn’t even listen to the whole thing. Maybe I’m saving that too.

There’s a part of me that wishes I’d found something from earlier, when he would have said It’s Dad instead of It’s Clayton, but he was never one to leave long voicemails, at least to me, so that would have likely been all it consisted of—call me back, maybe, or I love you.

one good thing

Buds, my friends. Buds on the plum tree in the front yard, buds on the little butterknife stalks of the surging daffodils, tiny buds on the lilac. The birds are holding loud summits in the treetops when I get up, & I’ve seen both a rabbit and possum in the backyard in the last week. As the note from my friend S. said the other day, spring is coming & you cannot stop it.

Thank you, as always, for reading. I’ll write you again soon, & in the meantime, may you find the artifact that sharpens a memory you feared was growing dull before its time.