🦷 TREE 426: Dance Me to the End 3

This week we are extremely fortunate to be enjoying words and song choices from writer and maverick writing teacher Alison Acheson. Today’s drawing is by me and it is possibly the worst drawing I have ever made public as an adult. It’s weird though.

Grow slowly
Jeff

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These excerpts are from my memoir, Dance Me to the End: Ten Months and Ten Days With ALS, a story of my time caregiving. It’s recently been re-released as an audio book, narrated by a voice artist with the perfect tone and pacing, Ellen Dubin. I am so grateful for her part in this story. We do learn from the most exacting times in our lives and, in spite of all, it is a gift to be a student. Mostly, I learned big things about the small. (Lightly edited and reprinted with permission from Touchwood Editions, 2019) —AA

One: This is Us.

There came a morning when Marty decided he needed the walker to push around the house. Again, our world shifted.

I did the usual preparation for breakfast while he was in the bathroom. I set out the denture fixative. (He’d had scarlet fever as a young child, resulting in the loss of his teeth by the time he was a young teenager.) It had taken more than a few days to get the amount right with the changes to his gums. I would apply it with a toothpick. Couldn’t be too much or too little. But that day, Marty decided to rinse his teeth and he set the lower plate on the seat of the walker, pushed into the kitchen, rinsed it, and returned to the table with the teeth again on the seat. It struck me as both funny-sad and as an act that embodied dignity, doing his utmost to take care of his own needs.

This is us, I thought. This is us now.

Later, going to sleep, I thought of the good things in the day: today he took some pleasure in his food, and asked for pasta with clam sauce; we found a new series, and enjoyed watching it; he didn’t take a tumble; and something funny was said and laughed at, but I couldn’t remember what it was.

It’ll come to me, I scribbled in my journal.

I remembered: I pinched his bottom, as he walker-ed out of the kitchen, and he quirked something like his old grin at me. That was noteworthy.

Two.

Whether you agree with it morally or not, getting a 10-foot-tall robot with messianic delusions as your wine waiter is a genius marketing move.

Three.

In memory of Marty, Steely Dan: “Fire in the Hole”.