Other people's bananas

   Lately all I want to do is sit on the deck and read the Kindle he gave me for Christmas and so Michael wants to know if I am alright. And why am I in a bad mood?
   And I forgive him, because it must be wearing to live with the Angel of Death for 624 days.

That is equal to one year, eight months, 16 days. Or 445 weekdays and 179 weekend days. Or 89 weeks and one day. Or 14,976 hours. Or 898,560 minutes. 

   Or 53,913,600 seconds.

   You try living with someone like me for something like that amount of time, see how compassionate you wind up being.

   
   Before Michael gave me the Kindle, I'd fallen out of the habit of reading for pleasure. Everything was nonfiction, everything was work. Self-improve. Measure up. Use that time.
   But since Mom collapsed and started to die on Sept. 27, 2014 — has it really been so long? Yes. I tried to explain to people back then that she was dying, that this was a hideous, horrifying, maddening emergency, but they didn't seem to take me seriously and instead went on with their little errands, caring about work and relying on me to care about work as usual, and then her dying went on and on and on and ON, until last week she passed her second birthday in the nursing home — well, after her collapse, I couldn't read anything but the virtuous or the required.
   But now I have this Kindle and I read whatever: Elizabeth Warren, Tolstoy, Neil Gaiman, that Foundations book, that book about How Not to Die and Lev Grossman, Pretty Good Poems, Emily St. John Mandel ... whatever. Someone mentions a title, I download it and start reading.

   I'm working my way through Louise Penny's Armand Gamache mysteries, which are set in Quebec. They are humane, mildly appalling and as soon as I finish one, another presents itself to my Kindle.
   I sit on our screened porch, out of the artificial chill of the never-ending AC, and with the neighborhood birds as background noise, I try to see Armand's kind brown eyes and try not to see who killed whom and why before he does.
   A few books ago, Gamache learned something about Buddhism and, I don't know, psychology maybe, that seemed to apply directly to this long ordeal with my mom. I haven't blogged anything here while I've been turning his insight over and over in my mind.
   Can you guess what it was? 
   Go ahead and guess.
   I'll wait.
   Ha, ha. My little joke. Because I know the actual universe is not all about me, I know there is no earthly way anyone who isn't me could guess what I'm thinking until I say.
   It was the concept of the "near enemy." 
   Very different attitudes that result in the same behavior but to totally different ends. For instance, how compassion differs from pity, pity locking us in our self-centered sense of superiority, compassion allowing us to see the world through someone else's eyes. 

   Love vs. attachment. Respect vs. indifference. Joy vs. frivolity.

   At first, after I read about this subtle stuff, I fretted over the problem of assuming one is compassionate when really one despises the needy person. I was interrogating myself: You seem to be doing good deeds but are you really a selfish jerk? But then it occurred to me that so long as I go on doing the work that needs to be done, why is irrelevant. If motives don't get in the way of being useful, they do not matter.

   But now I'm stuck on Joy vs. Frivolity.

   When I'm in the moment that is being with my mom, we share joy. Because she is a joyous spirit, but also because we are friends of long standing. We have been friends for 60 years. Think about that. She has older daughters, but they are far away, and all her close friends are dead. My younger sister Beth and I are her oldest living friends. 
   Also, she is mine.
   And there is no one else in my life so reliably delighted by my frivolous insolence.

Mom and Zoe Lynch doing ... something ... near lady finger banana trees

   Like today she was hungry because she vomited last night because her congestion makes her cough, and she didn't eat much earlier because, hey, dying. And so by evening today she was hungry. When she's hungry, she talks about bananas. 
   If they will just give her a banana, she is content and so pleased she will tell people about that banana for hours: "I just ate a banana!"
   So this evening she was parked at the feeding table, slipped hopelessly sideways as she does because she cannot remember things like sitting up, and I sit down and put my yellow umbrella on the table. It has a duck head for a handle. She looks at that umbrella and she says, "We already have the umbrella."
   And I think, "Huh?" But I say, "Okay."
   Then she says, "Yellow." 
   And she's pleased with herself and I know why.
   Yellow, note, is also the color of bananas. She asks me, "Did we remember to plant the seed? You plant the seed and then the thing grows."

   The thing is a banana tree. She is worried that we don't have any bananas, that they no longer exist, that she will never get to eat another banana. And she is hungry.

   So I look at her, I get close to her face and I say, "Yes, but after we plant, we have to water the seed, too, or it dies." She peers at me confused but then she says, "That's right." She is hopeful that my sensible mention of caring for the seed means there will be a banana here soon.
   And I say, "And then when the tree grows up it is really tall, too tall for us to climb, so someone has got to climb up there or the monkeys get our bananas. Do you want to do it?"
    "Oh, I can't," she says. 
   She is worried, really worried.
   I look at her like, "Excuses." But I say, "We simply have got to fight those monkeys."

   She starts laughing. She laughs and laughs.
   "We already have the umbrella," she says.
   
   I don't think I have said this often enough yet: My oldest friend is dying. No, I am not alright.