So, Updates

I want to thank all of you from the bottom of my heart for all the support and kindness and emails and good vibes that are flooding my way right now. They are deeply, deeply appreciated and I am overcome with gratitude. You are all so very kind and sweet and thoughtful, and this means so much to me that I am kind of at a loss for words. Thank you, is all I can say, thank you, and it's working, because Mom is looking much better now, 24 hours in.

She's up at St. Joes on the 7th floor, happily getting to know all the nurses: inquiring after their children, learning their life stories and so on. She's getting blood, a lot of blood, and antibiotics and intravenous nutrition, and some pain killers that she says she doesn't want, but she's getting them anyway, thanks to one of those sotto voce conversations I had with the nurse. She was so thin and gray and kind of empty looking, like a camping air mattress that has had it, and now she's gently inflating again, back up to human levels. It's great to watch. I took a bunch of books over there today, mostly from this very very sweet thread, and only half of them were summarily rejected (she really is done with mysteries; she wasn't kidding,) which is a brilliant batting average for books taken to my mother.

Both my brothers are in town; this morning we were all crammed into her hospital room, laughing at each other and it was kind of oddly festive. Than my mom said we made her tired, but in a good way, and so we wandered off to lunch. We went back this evening, following a brief and hilarious interlude in which all four of us (me, my daughter and my two brothers) were standing in the hospital lobby holding open cel phones. "Could be a Wired cover," commented my older brother, and my younger one said, "More like Loser Magazine, Inc."

My cousin came by the hospital, which was a really good thing, since he's a lawyer and he looked over her paperwork, figured out what was missing, commandeered a notary and a couple of witnesses and got the Living Will and the Medical Power of Attorney (that would be me) all done up and notarized and witnessed and proper and correctly filed in with all of her other multitudinous records. It was good to see him; we all went out afterwards for what started out to be just beers and ended up being dinner.

I'm tired, though, very very tired. Tomorrow is another day. Mom's on a strict clear liquid diet along with all the intravenous nutrition in case they have to operate on her suddenly - hopefully they won't have to, but it's good they're ready if they have to be. It's a strange little vortex of time we're all in here - hurry up, worry, wait. Go, go, stop. Run, run, wait. Everyone's here, which feels like Christmas or something, but it's not really celebratory, and we're all keeping our phones right there next to us. There's nothing more really to be done, but we're all worried. It's weird. It's oddly timeless and at the same time I'm intensely aware of each passing moment.

The other day I said to a friend of mine that this whole thing, this birth/life/aging/death thing sucked and was unfair, awful, wrong and shouldn't be this way, that death was just too much, shouldn't happen. And she said, "Oh honey, it's already nearly impossible to get a parking space. Imagine if noone died." Which is hilarious and darkly funny and terribly, terribly true on some very deep levels.

Thanks again for all your thoughts and kind wishes. They are so deeply appreciated, I can't tell you how much.