Welcome to my blog which today is not happening. I have agonised over this. Quite simply I haven't had the time. Or made the time. Part of me thinks that if i don't get my 1,000 words done, the whole enterprise will fail and that if I don't succeed in my goals it will be because I didn't keep up my discipline. This is magical thinking but i do feel guilty that on saturday when I could have been writing this, I took a day off and went to the beach. (Did the sun shine? Sort of. When we arrived at the coast, there was a thick fog which meant we could sit ten metres from the the sea and still not see it. After a couple of hours, the mist slowly lifted and we had about twenty minutes to slap on the suncream before the cloud returned and the shirts and jumper went back on. The woman I was with likes to think of herself as hardy and she teased me about going in for a swim. As I find even Australian waters chilly, the idea of going in didn't appeal at all but as a gesture of good will I agreed to paddle alongside her. The water was freezing. If I'd been by myself, notihng would have persuaded me to brave the cold but the knowledge that this was the only day this year that I'd be in the water (plus the presence of a woman who was obviously looking forward to calling me a wimp) persuaded me to display a little ore fortitude and so it was that I became the first to immerse myself to shoulder level. Fuck it was cold! Immediately the breath was knocked out of my body. 'Stop panting,' ordered my companion. 'I can't,' i replied, though after a while I just managed to breathe normally. As soon as I accomplished that, I got out of the water and left her to take her own time. For a couple of minutes on the beach, I was really warm and quite pleased with myself. Then, having dried and dressed, I sat on the shingle to watch the world which had appeared after the fog lifted. Ten minutes later, I felt my body shivering inside as the shock set in. My fingers turned yellow and I felt extremely odd, sitting on a relatively warm beach, dressed in all my clothes and still getting colder. My companion then bounded out of the water, full of vigour and wows wasn't that amazings. Ten minutes later, she, like me, was fully dressed and chilled to the core to such an extent that it was only after we'd driven all the way home and she'd had a hot bath, did she warm up again.
Maybe, sometimes, it really is too cold to get in.
***
The reason i think I haven't got time to write this is because not a lot seems to be happening to my Day of dead project. Is it the nature of things, or the nature of my life, that often things 'feel' like they are gathering to happen, and then they don't? Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, last week, seemed full of potential progress but after that nothing cemented, no relevent emails arrived, the facebook ran out of steam and it felt like it was all beginning to drift away.
On Thursday, now I remember, we went to a meeting with the palliative care team at the local hospice. ( I say local, it's 40 minutes drive away and god knows how long on a rural bus, should it be running.) The plan was to get the team on board because i wanted the future customers of the team, ie maybe all of us, to meet the people who will midwife their dying.
The team were very sweet with us and said they were honoured to speak with us. They were keen to take part.
But.
But they didn't like the 'dead' word, didn't want hospices associated with dying and death. Although this seemed extraordinary to me, my colleague assured them that we would tone down the references to death on any publicity involving them. After an hour, we all shook hands and the manager said she would report back to her superiors.
Afterwards, Alison and I argued over this concealing death point, especially when I read a number of leaflets from the hospice, none of which mention death and dying. While appreciating their concern to position themselves as pain management specialists, I felt more and more that to deny their connection with death was a crying shame and only added to the problem, which is the lack of acknowledgement of the realities and meaningfulness of being a person at end of life. For a few hours, I fretted, writing and rewriting emails arguing the case before finally disciplining myself into a 99% agreeable thanking for the meeting, acknowledging their difficulty and promising to do my best. Even so I couldn't help but point out that in my opinion more people would come if it were called 'Day of the Dead' as opposed to 'the day of life limiting illnesses'.
So it goes.
Oh, I've written my blog after all.
No comments:
Post a Comment