16 August 2016

The metaphor thus echoes the experience of struggling with illness: we are, and are not, our bodies. If knowledge accrues and wisdom takes away, then Alzheimer’s is a kind of wisdom. That last visit as a family: my mother grabbed lettuce with her hands, carried the trash out to the garage in increments of pencil shavings, asked after the boy’s mother. Wisdom as non-sense. Take away her keys, the doctor advised me on another trip, and I did. Her house wasn’t taken until she was taken from it. Her last friend stopped seeing her when she felt there was no one to see. Is this a poetry of witness, or simply observation tricked up as meaning? Facebook, neither subject nor witness, spits out a memory from 9 years ago, though even then it was a memory, or the record of what would become one. Two small children on the Mall, the taller boy with his arm around the smaller girl, her white shoes, like his, velcroed shut, her not-yet-grown out hair. He’s wearing a blue Masubi Man teeshirt. Last or next to last time we all saw her. They’re smiling at me. Some days I can’t do Objectivism, sitting in my office, eyes pooling. There, I told you.

--16 August 2016

[Zwicky, #76]