A Year In Pictures Following The Break-Up

This calendar was on the wall in my grandmother's room. "Vacation Month" seems like a cruel theme inside a nursing home, a place almost no one wants to be.

I visited N's grandmother once, with N and her father. During my visit, at least, N's grandmother tried to hide her Alzheimers with a kind of elegant misdirection. If N's father asked her a question she didn't understand or know the answer to she would lean over conspiratorially to N or I, patting our knee and smiling as if to say, "Do you hear that silly question? That question is too silly to answer. Let's, you and I, not answer that question."

Afterward, as N's father drove us all back to his house he said that he never wants to get to that point, and mentioned, off-handedly, that he and his wife, N's mother, have an informal suicide pact for when they get old. It was hard to tell how serious he was, but it clearly upset N, who sat in the back seat, and I sensed that this subject had come up before.

I sat quietly in the passenger seat, not knowing what to say, but when N's father speculated that the hard part would be picking the right time, not too early, of course, but hopefully not too late, I nodded my head a little in agreement. That moment would have to be impossible to find. I would certainly slip completely into senility for fear of going too soon.

# posted by Arnie : 11:33 PM