I began writing the last blog entry the day before yesterday, continued writing the rest of it yesterday, had visitors all day today (delightful but exhausting) and will be packing and saying goodbye tomorrow at lunch, and then on my way home the day after tomorrow. When nothing happens, I don’t know what to write. When a lot happens I don’t have time to write. Should I write that I often now, between other activities, think about the end of my life? I’m surprisingly calm about that. Perhaps it will be painful. Would it be any less so, if I obsessed about it? Everything in its time, and this is evidently mine. We’ve trained ourselves to imagine every change of life as something we accomplish. Dying is not an achievement (except in the sense that I can spare myself and my family further ordeals). I will want and need the support of my family and friends. If anything, death should seal our equality with all life. It’s a way of being one with all living (and therefore dying) creatures. To regard dying at my age as a singular injustice is to extract oneself from the community of life, a kind of inner death, une mort dans l’âme.
Today, Friday, I woke up too early but then went back to sleep and dreamed that my wife was once again baby-sitting small children who unsurprisingly had not grown any bigger in the meantime. Here was tiny Lukas, cute as an Hispanic teddy bear and laughing at her antics. But what was this? He was signaling that he needed my attention just as much. After cleaning up a mess I had made on the floor, I picked him up in my arms and felt his loving embrace. He hadn’t forgotten me or stopped loving me.
Signed,
Andrew (Weeks)
Normal Thoughts 