precious

Every day it’s the same old thing. Every day another world ends, bang or whimper, flood or fire. Old age or sickness, accident or intended end, wrong place wrong face wrong species— the gone gets going along. One day you have a life, the next day you’re done. Life is precious in the general, much less so in the specifics. Down to last acts and brass tacks, each little life doesn’t look so cute. Whether clear cut forests or feed lot heroes or unloved people, it’s slaughterhouse rules. Drop dead, there’s a chorus singing all the reasons you deserve it.

There’s not much to me these days, there never really was. I turn the pages, I work my beat, the days fly by with no one getting better. I get my mother up each morning, I put her to bed each night. Her dementia is all that’s getting stronger. Lately basic words elude her, things she used to care for, things she always knew while her body falls apart in drips and drabs. The slow senescence of her mother seems to have been among her inheritance, taciturn and stubborn as her world contracts down to a few rooms, digital books and the radio. We’re both on our third acts. After she passes, I’m all epilogue.

The years rush through me, the days make me spell it out. Live so long and learn so little, and make a mess of every breath and blessing that ever fell my way, only earning the indignities and the humiliations heaped upon me. I move through list and labor, grudgingly attending to my obligations as I dissolve into failing organs and bad faith. Hacking out these daily epitaphs as basic words elude me and my life contracts down to a few rooms and too many unruly animals. Whatever it was I wanted now moved from the improbable to the impossible. If only all this going didn’t take so long