Incipient Change

Mom is dying. She’s been putting it off for a while, but when the nurse you trust tells you to book a flight, you can feel that the ground has shifted.

I would have left already but I thought that I had picked up the cold one of my kids was carrying around last week, and it walloped me hard enough that after spending one sleepless night tossing and turning, I went and got some NyQuil. I normally shy away from cold medicine and antihistamines. They don’t play well with my weird neurochemistry, and I’d rather feel slightly under the weather and suffer through than put up with the loopiness and unfortunately the inevitable repercussions of doing something wrong while under the influence.

But I took the NyQuil, and got a solid ten hours of sleep. I feel better, but I’m only taking Tylenol while I’m awake, which means by the end of the day, I’m pretty drained. I’m hoping this is the last day of it, and tomorrow, after I drop the boys off from school, I’ll hit the road towards Kentucky.

But something has changed. I’m thinking of the Taoists who taught that change is neither good nor bad, it just is. I was planning to write how my grief had shifted in the last couple of days, still grief, but lighter and easier to carry. I was also going to write about how it felt as if something had shifted inside me as well, a step had finally been taken internally, something that had been stalled had sputtered to life. I could feel some sort of change within.

I was blearily bustling about the apartment this morning, doing laundry and cleaning, getting ready for the boys to spend the night, when the timer went off for the COVID test I took since I had cold-like symptoms and I would be traveling to a nursing home. And once again, everything changed.

A false negative is more likely than a false positive, the nurse told me over the phone. I was to quarantine for five days, and then wear a mask for five days after that. All my plans are shot, and I am not feeling better, at least the way I expected.

It’s been six weeks now. Pepsi and I both feel at home. Yesterday, I started to hang things on the walls, and pressed the landlord on when they’re going to fix the bathtub. We’re settling in. Change is happening all around, in all sorts of forms.