moonwalk

Video: Moon Film Trailer

Random detritus in honor of tomorrow's 40th anniversary of the first walk on the moon, and because this blog needs a break from death and dying. (Although it just occurred to me that the moon is a dead satellite, so maybe I'm not departing that far afield after all.)

• The trailer is from Moon, in theaters now, an achingly lonely masterful portrayal of a solitary man harvesting helium 3 from the far side of the moon. It's also about everything that it means to be human. See it see it see it. (Oh: Plus big ass harvesters.)



• How we got video from the moon to earth (via @robertbrand) »



• If you fall into the conspiracy camp, here's how we faked it »



• Evidence that reducing, reusing and recycling is not always a good idea -- especially when it comes to NASA and the original lunar landing tapes (via b1-66er) »



• How to Moonwalk like MJ with bonus sexy British narrator (female) »

do not go gentle

I'm returning to the land of the living for a few days -- two weeks away at the drop of the hat leaves a lot of stuff undone. I'll tidy up, deliver on some things, then return to the west coast for a meeting and a drive up the coast to return again to Grama.

Unless an unwelcome call comes before then.

I left her in the hands of my dad (her son) and my extended family and her kind competent nursing staff who have taken to calling her Grama (after all of us calling her Grama) plus her very own dedicated hospice nurse. She's been semi-conscious for days, no language, barely eating, hardly opening her eyes, and I fooled myself into believing that she wouldn't even know I was leaving. Even though she calms down when the nurses are turning her and I stroke her hair and tell her just real quick, Grama, they'll be done in a bit. Even though last night while we sat alone when the room quieted after everyone went to dinner she opened both eyes wide and just looked at me a while with those same dreamy loving eyes she's always looked at me with.

I've never had a harder time saying goodbye. Because she did know, and she cried as I cried, and she grimaced with the pain of it and I kissed her again and again and again.

I've spent the last two weeks with her, 8 to 12 hours a day. And it wasn't nearly enough.

the legend motel (movie)

Des Moines, WA along Pacific HWY 99
Cameraphone

the hospice bill of last rights

The right to be in control
The right to have a sense of purpose
The right to reminisce
The right to be comfortable
The right to be touched
The right to laugh
The right to be angry and sad
The right to have a respected spirituality
The right to hear the truth
The right to be in denial

Found in the little pink book that the nice
hospice people gave us.

I <3 hospice.

burn and rave

death, like sex, is something the movies almost nearly always get wrong

for one thing: it doesn't pace itself toward the final frame

unlike its cousin birth it can't be clocked

the body heats to extremes like a rocket straining to clear the atmosphere

rattles and trembles from the effort of querying the cloud bank for safe passage

then settles to rest a while longer on the soft soil of home

(repeat)

monumental

Today I bought a couple of headstones, but neither of them were for my Grama, which caused some momentary confusion among family members who thought I had taken it upon myself to order one up.

I had not. It's my policy to only think about burying people once they're ready to be buried. Grama's not there yet.

But Grama and I have long had the habit of hanging out in graveyards together, and Lake View was one of our favorite haunts.

Her sister is buried there, along with her much cherished grandmother, and I've written before about how together we would uncover the sod that overtakes their pauper stones with ferocious regularity.

Now that I'm gone to Chicago and since Grama stopped driving some time back there's no one near to make sure that the small cement blocks stay exposed to the sun.

So I stopped by Lake View Cemetery today to order up a couple of headstones, one for Corinne and one for Ingeborg, and when I told Grama, who graduated out of language about 48 hours ago, what I had done, she fixed me with her one good eye (things have gotten very Diving Bell and Butterfly) and loved on me good.

If she'd been feeling better I might also have told her how the mortician had a gangster's last name and had the incongruous habit of using the expression "la dee dah" as a comma. She would have come back with an unbearably funny observation and we would have giggled until, quite possibly, we were in danger of wetting our pants.

As is our custom.

But what I got was enough.

It's been so good, all of it. We've had a tremendous goodbye.

(Now if only my heart weren't so broken.)

Posting by cameraphone from Grama's bedside where she lies dozing.

Thursday.

Quieter and quieter.

Wednesday.

Posting by cameraphone.

Tuesday.

Sleepovers with Grama used to mean weekends ensconced with my sister in the "Princess Suite" -- my grandparents' name for the refurbished upstairs bedroom that had formerly been a mother-in-law apartment over the refinished garage when my great-grama lived with them.

It meant steak -- always steak -- and a salad of iceberg lettuce and marinated artichoke hearts.

It meant popcorn and old movies or old movie musicals -- whatever was on the networks before cable. Zorro. Shane. The Sound of Music. It meant Grama bursting into a full throated "Climb Every Mountain" as the final credits rolled.

It meant good night bear hugs and waking early and running downstairs as eager as Christmas morning, bare feet on the cold cement corridor pointed towards the warm kitchen smelling of coffee (always coffee, strong and dark) where I'd climb high on the counter stool in my nightie and wait for waffles or omelets or something equally delicious while reading the trivet that sat on my grandmother's stove: "Grow old with me: the best is yet to be.

It meant a weekend with Grama and Bompa: playing, giggling, being alive.

Last night a sleepover with Grama meant curling up in my clothes on the cot that her kind night Aid rolled in for us last Friday. It meant waking at three to converse with the nurse about whether we should turn her, whether we should give her the Tylenol suppository that she hates to have administered but that seems to alleviate her discomfort.

It meant pulling away her oxygen tube at dawn at her tugging request and watching her fitful right hand, the only one that remains truly mobile, flit to her eye and then curl below her chin as if the weight of her head were resting there, in a gesture I've shared with her always, unconsciously, deep in my DNA.

Monday.

Last night I sat in the quiet settling twilight with my grandmother. I pulled back the blinds once the sun had transitioned close to the horizon and the glare no longer threatened to scorch her broadly dilated pupils. There's a large hydrangea bush outside her window in full glorious bloom and she watched the day's light linger on its leaves while I watched her.

I can't take my eyes off her. She remains the most beautiful woman I have ever known.

Earlier we talked of our friendship. We talked of how we love each other.

Later a nurse stopped by to administer eye drops for her glaucoma and for the shingles that have tormented her in these last weeks, and she asked me, sensitive to my vigil, "Good Grama?"

"The best," I said, choking on tears.

But the best doesn't nearly capture the way this woman has loved me and I have loved her. And the name Grama doesn't nearly hold all the ages that we've fended for each other and fought off each others foes.

What Grama said, as she said goodbye again and again and lifted her weak arms to hug me and asked for kiss after kiss, nearly captures it:

"I've never known a separation like this -- the agony -- indescribable."

mitzvah

I don't how to write about the last few days. It's too raw too close too unknown still, this slow walk home.

But I will say that I keep playing the tape of my grandmother's voice through my head; the words she's been able to say to me in her few brief lucid moments: "my angel", "sweetheart", "beautiful girl", "that's my girl", "bless you", and "good friend".

She has words for all of us -- words that are equally dear, equally clear -- for her family who have gathered around. She knows us by name and calls for those who weren't able to come.

But I am selfish and my heart is breaking, and I loop only the words in my mind that she gave to me.

Posting by cameraphone from Des Moines, WA.

provisioning.

When my dad was a kid growing up on Three Tree
Point just down the road this was a tin shop. Now it's
a swanky eatery in the newly swankified town of
Burien just Southwest of Seattle. We swung through
here yesterday to grab a bite and now again this
afternoon I'm making a coffee run for the troops.

It's a little unsettling to see Burien looking so hip,
but it's nice, too, to see folks loving on this place
that I love so much.

We're settling in for whatever may be next. I'll be
staying another week.

Posting by cameraphone.

good friend.

Took this shot of Grama somewhere on the Southern coast of Norway just before our fish chowder arrived.

Which was delicious.

It now sits next to Grama's hospital bed. We're headed into hospice care. My heart is shattered.

The gift of this: a strange lucidity that has pierced her Alzheimer's. She knows me and calls me by name. We've showered each other with endearments. And goodbyes.

Posting by cameraphone from Burien, WA.