As I’ve mentioned here before, rock nyc LLC partner Donna Mcelroy is currently in hospice and her husband and her friends await the inevitable inevitably; Joseph with much more fortitude than I can manage. Maybe 20 years ago I was in a train crash near Jacksonville and the train crash was bad but all the praying and crying was much worse. Hospice can be much the same.
Joseph wrote this about spending his days with Donna in hospice:
“Old woman moaning “I don’t want to die”
Another, shrieking and pounding the walls.
The families of the soon-to-be-dead
scolding them like children as if they cared.
“Where is the Science?” I ask myself.
“These problems are supposed to be solved.”
But the only answer I get is another shriek.
I am pissed. I am angrier than an old man
who’s old woman didn’t pack his lunch.
I’m pissed cause I won’t ever have anything to eat.
I feel like shrieking myself. “I don’t want to cry!”
But who the fuck cares?
The only one who might listen…can’t.
So I walk a winding cement path every day,
To and from a window in a room, that is on a floor,
Where old women shriek.
And I wait for when I will”
I went to visit Joseph and Donna and they had changed hospices by then and the new one was quieter, but it had the quiet of neutral, a place where everything was grounding out of time, where it felt like you had falled down a trap door, where you were floating in a sea of grief, a world of numbness where nothing would ever get you back to where you once were and where beyond this room and these doors, you may be again but not now.
I’ve been listening to Elvis Costello’s “Battered Old Bird” –only one line seems to sink in but the sound of it in the verses has the weariness. In the song it sounds like age but there are other things too happy to carry. It is the heaviness of despair, the heaviness of loss, the unbearable heaviness of being. Joseph was telling me how he was tired all the time but nothing is more wearying than sorrow: it slows you in your tracks, it stops you on the soles of your feet and like time you stop and nobody is going anywhere, until everything stops entire and then you scream and it begins again: “there’s a place where time stands still”.
