Blinking Cursors
Staring at a blinking cursor seems to be my hobby of late. Maybe because words give permanence to an unwanted reality, or maybe because my thoughts are too slippery and evasive.
Many have gone before me on this journey - if it can be called one. Is it a journey when the task of the hour is standing, sitting or lying still and waiting? for death.
It is nothing like I expected. Sometimes it is gut wrenching. Sometimes it is joyful. Sometimes it is comical. Sometimes it just is...
The gut wrenching would be when I sat on the floor of the Salt Lake City airport minutes before boarding at midnight. Because it was so late, it was inordinately quiet. I snuck away from the crowd and found a spot on the floor so my fellow passengers couldn't hear me gently begging my confused father to go through with the procedure to drain the fluid around his heart so he would be alive when I got there in the morning. I wouldn't know the outcome until I landed 4 hours later.
The joyful would be when we took a quick trip to Maine a few weeks back to eat seafood, Italian sandwiches, and red hot dogs and traipse around his old stomping grounds. In between hanging out with family, we drove around the sleepy frozen-in-time town of Mt. Vernon where he grew up fishing through a hole in the floor of their home.
We drove past the dance hall he hung out in on Saturday nights and the church where he graduated from 8th grade. We stopped in front of his teacher, Ms. Webber's old house, as he told us about the time he and three other boys picked up her VW bug and placed it in-between two posts, just so she would know how much they liked her.
The comical would be when my sister hid behind a tree in the front yard to make sure my independent 80 year old father would not take a tumble only to be spotted by said father.
"Angel, what are you doing?" my puzzled angry father said.
"Just putting something in the trunk of the car," my guilty caught sister explained.
"That's a long way to the car!" my intelligent father concluded.
She proceeded to the trunk to put something in there that she really needed to bring into the house.
These moments are sprinkled into the cracks and crevices of our days that mostly consist of waiting. Trying to do "normal" when life is most-certainly abnormal.
So life goes on in Utah with my sweet daughter, Ana, joining our staff and students on a missions trip to Las Vegas and my husband holding down the fort while I sit in my bed in Virginia waiting, being available, arranging hospice visits, having a broken air conditioner replaced, staring at blinking cursors and waiting.