Hospice Nurse Evaporates Black Hole

This just in! Scientists have discovered that if you accidentally fall into a black hole, you do come out again. Such a relief! Not only that, but when you come out, you make the black hole evaporate. It’s due to something called quantum entanglement. Particles can be linked at the quantum level and display reactivity to each other even if separated by thousands of miles.

I could have done with this good news the other day, one of those days when you feel the black hole hovering a little too nearby for comfort. I started my work day with a visit to a young man who is dying of liver failure. Turned out nobody had told him, non English speaker that he is, that he is dying, or that the way his belly keeps filling up with fluid is indicative of end stage liver failure and is not going to stop. He took my news okay, in his quiet understated way, though who can tell what he was really feeling. 

After that I got called to a dying patient who had died by the time I got there. I had to tell her husband of 66 years, who has mild dementia of the sort that doesn’t really allow you to take on board the fact that your wife of 66 years just died in the next room that his wife just died in the next room. He seemed to get it when I knelt down beside him to tell him. In a general sort of way. As I led him into her room so he could say goodbye, he said “my girl is gone.” He was dry-eyed through my whole visit, kept reassuring me he was okay. It was me, walking to my car, who dissolved into tears in the cold Fall rain. 

Then there’s the Covid.

Sometimes you just need a serious jolt of humor to chase away those suicidal ideation blues. It is getting a little chilly in the Hudson Valley. Nobody told me there was a temperature below 65 degrees Fahrenheit. Have I been living in a fool’s paradise? Wednesday I went out to drive off to work and my car was completely encased in ice. I thought I could just turn on the windshield wipers with some windshield wiper fluid and we’d be good. Turned out that would completely ruin the windshield wipers. We would have to scrape the ice off the windshield manually, with  implements specially designed for the task. Implements? I wandered around our house and basement looking for sharp shiny metal objects that looked like giant palette knives. Our available implements turned out to be about as suited to the task as cooked spaghetti. After two of them, I had to resort to putting my vehicle in the microwave.

The spectacular Fall colors in the Hudson Valley have washed out to a palette of grays and browns. After the very last of the brave maples let go of their golden leaves, I spent a couple of days in a bit of a low place. All there was to see was sticks for trees with overtones of grey and brown. Even the squirrels seemed to have given up bounding across the roads and through the sticklike tree forests foraging for giant nuts. Instead they just lay in the middle of the roads with their innards smushed in a squishy sort of roadkill stew.

Then one morning I woke up and realized: it’s not exactly that the glorious Fall colors have all gone. Instead, they have been replaced with a beautifully subtle and mellow palette of grays, browns, and dark deciduous greens, cut through artistically with the streaks of red that indicate the innards of roadkill squirrels, skunks, and foxes. It’s not sad. It’s gorgeous. You just have to adjust your thinking.

I lay in bed, adjusting my thinking. I had been awake on and off all night with dreams of menace and threat. At 6am, I turned towards the window in the bedroom where I had gone for sleep solace and I saw two deer nosing around the remaining greenery behind our cabin. They were entirely unaware of the love that I immediately and unrequitedly lavished upon them from my lying position upon my bed. So delicate. So wild. So oblivious of me, despite their continued twitching towards the prevailing forest scents. I loved them for a little longer, and then I got up and adjusted my thinking further in a hot shower.

My daughter is not going to be able to fly out to be with me for Thanksgiving. My daughter is not going to be able to fly out to be with me for Christmas. The best that we can do, and it is really a ton of fun, is try to imagine tropical locations where we can meet sometime in Spring. Winter will be socking me in in the Hudson Valley, I do not know whether I will have sufficient implements identified to carve myself out of the weather. Covid will be running its course, whatever that is. Names like Caymen and Bahama and Maui tantalize us both. There is no knowing whether the pandemic will jerk these names out of reach. Could be so. Streaks of red on the roadsides.

As I drove away from my last patient this afternoon, the wintry sun burst with an energy I had not thought it capable of. It sparkled across the landscape of tributaries, swamps, wintry fields, brightly colored metal bridges, lakes, and ponds. I put the Spotify playlist that I share with Jessie on shuffle. Colours came on, by Grouplove. If the color’s red, no need to be sad, it really ain’t that bad...Really, yes: the colors are not yellow and gold any more but they are rust and so many shades of brown and light and dark grey and the figures of trees are reaching up to something that I can’t even imagine because I have never lived under this sky before but I’m willing to be open to it and not let the end of the vibrant colors bring me down but wait, patiently wait for the deep quiet of the snow.

All seven of the planets are visible in the night sky this week. If we ran outside in the subzero temperatures in our California very sadly underprepared clothing we might see them, should we remember in the subzero moment which to direction to look in. Much better to lie in our bed in our former summer cabin porch now actual winter bedroom and get the panoramic view from its walls of windows. Angel, our new rescue cat walks back and forth over us, back and forth, looking for the softest parts of our bodies to step on with her poky paws. She has found my rack of hanging necklaces. Bat, bat, bat. One by one they are disappearing down behind the bedside table. Like all cats, she loves keyboards. riuywp5[320tu.

People here keep telling me that Winter hasn’t started yet. Then they see my expression and they say reassuringly it’s not that bad. I know what they’re doing. But holing up is starting to have a nice ring to it. We have a hundred and eleven million books in our tiny cabin. I’m imagining just curling up on our sofa and working my way through them. Some of them have titles like Icons in Bulgaria (I am not making this up), but still. And we have hot chocolate, and rye, with the aid of which hot chocolate becomes hot spikolate. And if the black hole of January threatens to pull me in, I could always employ a spot of quantum entanglement and clamber out in May when the narcissi are poking up through the last of the snow.