Dunkirk NY – It doesn’t take much to realize I’ve been absent since last writing in early June. Apart from More Light, the last post I wrote was June 4, 2018. On June 9, 2018, my father passed away rather unexpectedly at the age of 89. During a family reunion he had organized to celebrate his and my mother’s birthdays, he had a massive coronary event. At 12:30pm I was chatting with him as he sat in one of his chairs in my brother’s house, where the gathering took place. At 5:30pm I was staring at his lifeless body off the emergency room of the local hospital. It’s been downhill since then.
I am not sure I would call what followed a period of depression. I think of it more as a period of disinterest. But I can’t deny his death brought about a few changes in my situation. He died while I was in the middle of rehearsals for King Lear, and the ensuing rehearsals and performances allowed me to stay busy until the show’s run was completed. After the show closed, I returned to help my brother settle our mother into the in-law apartment he had built into his new house for just this eventuality. It had become clear during the ensuing weeks after his death that my father had been covering for my mother’s growing dementia. I am now part of the three-brother team assisting her in getting through the days. I’m fully in that phase of life where I am helping to take care of my mom. Adjusting to this new reality has been a major part of the reason I stopped writing.
In the months that followed, death seemed to be stalking me. My oldest friend Tony died September 21 at the VA Hospital in New York City, and as he had no family, I ended up being the one who had to attend to his final affairs. My mother’s brother, my uncle Armando, died in early December, and on this Christmas Day past a good colleague and friend for 30 years, Mac Nelson, died; again, suddenly. This list does not account for the deaths of 3 other people I had worked with in the past in Buffalo theatre.
Given these events and more (a minor knee operation which still put me down for 5 weeks in October), I began to grow disinterested in many things. It has seemed as if I had lost control of living in some ways, because the schedule of things I had planned to do did not happen. The old saying “life happens while you’re busy making plans” seemed quite true. No solo camping trip to Yellowknife; no two-month fall trip in the RV. November arrived, darkness and winter has set in, and since Thanksgiving the weather in these parts has been nothing but grey and rainy, with little to no sunlight for long stretches of time. Filling the days has become a challenge.
All these deaths have put into sharp relief the notion that I have a short time left. And the thing is, it isn’t a matter simply of time. It’s also a matter of deterioration. It is 23 years until I turn 90, but how many years is it before I become physically unable to fend completely for myself? How long before I can no longer hike an entire day? How long before travel becomes impossible? What health complications lie ahead? In short, I may had those 23 years ahead, but what will the quality of those years be?
I have some catching up to do here, and I will probably be doing that over the course of the next few weeks. 2019 does look at this point like a busy year already. I have two shows booked, and a 4-week stretch of time scheduled to spend in AZ in Feb/March. I have applied to become a volunteer driver for the Disabled American Veterans (DAV), driving vets to medical appointments, but so far the process has been agonizingly slow, and I haven’t started up yet (and may not until April). I would like to get back in the writing habit if I can, because for one thing it fills time in the day, and for another, it should have some effect in sharpening up my writing skills.
I would say right now I remain unfocused in terms of what I would like to accomplish in the next few years, and I am also still unfocused in terms of how I spend my days. As 2019 begins, I need to spend time reclaiming both my daily routine as well as long-range goals. I need to overcome this general sense of disinterest in life around me. The quieter, slower, more self-directed pace of retirement has, I believe, become my greatest challenge of all, because I have no external motivating factors involved. My three-year period of de-compression has one more year to go, and I need to spend this year transitioning from that sense of release to something that is more active. It doesn’t have to be large-scale projects, but I do have to learn to invent and execute my own projects. I have to choose to do things, such as choosing to write this post today. Didn’t someone write somewhere that hell is having to make choices? -twl