Dead Letter Department #60

weather report

I am behind: on work, on getting back to friends, on my chores, on my email.  I talk a good game about resting, etc, but am finding it quite difficult in actuality, now that the inital days of required recovery are over. Out of the corner of my eye I can always see things piling up. My ability to nap seems to be diminishing daily, & I don’t know if you know this, but allowing the internet to pour information & emotion directly into your eyeballs is not actually resting, or even particularly restful. It might feel more relaxing than whatever I’m supposed to be doing, but it has the opposite of the desired effect. I did a little better when J was still here—it ironically being easier for me to schedule leisure activities with someone, because then there’s a block on my mental calendar that I can’t fill to the brim with anxious churning—but as wonderful as it was to have her, that was only ever temporary.

A fair chunk of my time has been spent shuttling back & forth to hospice, although not at much as I would like with my friend, since she’s been sleeping hard a lot of the times I’ve tried to stop by. I brought ice cream yesterday, since that was the only thing that had sounded good to her, & narrowly avoided a complete meltdown in the Haggen frozen dessert aisle about what the best flavor would be if you knew it was the last one someone was going to eat by just snatching at random from Ben & Jerry’s. I sat there with it in my lap, wrapped up in a dishtowel to keep the condensation from soaking everything, while she slept, & I’ll be bringing it back today to see if she’s awake enough to give it a try.

If you’re wondering about the ethics here (which I always do, with other people’s work—like, did you ask about this? Do they know?), I do have her permission. I mentioned writing loosely, with the usual caveats about respect & anonymity, & actually had no intention of getting as specific as I have here, but she waved her hand and told me, “Write whatever you want.” I asked a couple more check in questions, just to be sure, & she was. She had been asking me about what was going on with my other writing projects—lying in her hospital bed, on the way to hospice, & still so interested in what other people were up to, still remembering, & engaged.

The place itself is almost shockingly nice, especially after the chaos & discomfort of the hospital. It’s down past one of the local garden centers, so everything is green as you’re driving up. There are little baskets of snacks everywhere, & soothing paintings. The windows open, & you can push the hospital bed out onto a little private patio if your person wants you to. They make homemade soup, & let you visit any time. I didn’t know hospice could be so nice. She’s still dying. I can’t quite grapple with the gravity of it, so I keep fixating on the small, pointless shit, like flavors of ice cream.

There are a couple people in my life who have what I would call a very casual relationship with the idea of death, although I can’t always parse where passive suicidal ideation leaves off & a healthy non-attachment begins. I am the opposite—absolutely consumed with existential dread about the idea of running out of time, the finality of it, the utter unprovable unknown. When I started having diagnosable anxiety attacks, that’s one of the things they were about.

I get mad about not having enough faith to hang any sort of comfort on, to the point where I picked an entire fight with my mom one time that was, essentially, how dare she have brought me into this world if she didn’t have a lock on what she thought this was about. This is insane, I realize: agnostics are allowed to have children, & she was pretty gracious about having this particular accusation leveled at her, although it has honestly been on my to do list to go have the same conversation/fight with my dad, just to see what he’ll say. Sometimes I wish I’d have a conversion experience just to stop turning the same question over & over in my mind—I’d be such a good religious person, in some ways. I’m just waiting for the right spot to insert my heartfelt devotion.

Not that it would really be any easier to wrap my mind around an old friend going out of this world, I do know that, but I don’t even have the comfort of believing I’ll see her in heaven, or run into her in the next life, or meld into some sort of greater consciousness dissipation where we’ll bump into each other as little soul molecules. I wish I did.

one good thing

Shirley Jackson has been in my brain for decades, ever since some summer reading program in high school had us reading her domestic essays, Life Among the Savages & Raising Demons, which I am currently searching up on Biblio.com since I shed my copies somewhere along the way. We Have Always Lived in the Castle & the Haunting of Hill House I’ve read more times than I can shake a stick at, but I somehow never got any deeper into her fiction. There’s a newish (2021) collection of her letters that I happened to stumble across in a stacks browsing session at the library, & I can feel an obsession awakening. She’s so funny & raw, even as a teenager, tapping away at a manual typewriter she’s calling ernest, writing everything in lowercase because it’s faster, utterly convinced that her work is good even though everyone is telling her it’s terrible. Her confidence is intoxicating.

Thank you for being here at the Dead Letter Department. If you like the newsletter, please share it with a friend or consider subscribing to the secret edition, where I’m writing my way through transition. Write to me anytime at departmentofdeadletters@gmail.com.

I hope to see you here at the Dead Letter Department again soon, & in the meantime, may your browsing of the stacks yield unexpected delights.