I am In Dependent (don't read if you don't cuss)

pic by Leor MillerThis is how I swim now. With the full support of my daughter I can kick like a toddler learning to swim. Except of course I fucking know how to swim. I fucking used to pass the fucking alpha males with their gear and their struts and I was fucking proud! 

Pride comes before a

whoops.

I fell the other day as I turned my head to look at a dear friend who had agreed to walk me to the park. Several days later Hospice came to enroll me and told my daughter she would need to move in because I wasn't safe alone. Hospice looked at her and spoke of me as she. Hospice scolded me for wanting to be independent and suggested a 'commode' and oxygen and a hospital bed.

Fuck that.

I am really so sorry. Every once in a while my beloved father reads my blog, and I know damn well that swearing actually hurts him. ok, I've put a warning in the title, so now I can do anything I want?

Fuck that, because everything she said may be true but I am not that person who lies on a hospital bed sipping oxygen, shitting in a commode, and being addressed via a pronoun. I am independent. So it won't be me; someone else will have to do it. 

After that initial visit by a Hospice nurse whom I shall not name because she has a beautiful spiritual name that does not suit her there was another visit by an actual person who will be my ongoing nurse. She addressed me, asked about my life, told about hers, made sure I was comfortable before taking my blood pressure, made a suggestion or two about how to keep me safe. I felt fucking grateful, and something like love. 

So I started becoming who I need to be to accept help. or is it whom? Oh, that reminds me, here's a poem I wrote for my mother's memorial yesterday.

Today we remember
who you were, who you are,
who you made us.
No.
Whom.

Editor, poet, butterfly
seeing butterflies
landing, sipping, retreating.

Now gone, the butterflies,
and a newborn world
stumbles
on their absence.

I was ecstatic to be in the water, to feel it on my skin, to feel the buoyancy of my body, to feel the infinite pour through me. Even if, and maybe especially if, I was dependent on my daughter for the experience. 

This is who I was.

Who am I now?

September 18, 2021