2007-08-30 - 6:57 a.m.

We talked about the college, about how his plans are starting to come together for incorporating alternative energies into the heating and ventilation systems. Deep coils absorbing and distributing heat at a third the cost of electric heat. I find it interesting because it’s something my father and I can talk about, and also because the specifics of engineering have always seemed so arcane. Heat pumps and chillers may as well be sorcery to me.

He retires in four months, and who knows how many more months beyond he’ll be alive. I hope for years, but a heavy body with veins hardened by so many years of weight and pressure can only do so much. Weight and pressure can do amazing things with coal over ages, but with my father, I’m afraid we’re not talking geologic time.

My mother woke up when my father went back to bed. Panic attack, and a sick stomach to top it. She shook and paced and reluctantly took half an Atavan. Some sort of tranquilizer she takes sometimes in the summer to help her deal with the heat and pressure. After half an hour, she’s sitting in her rocking chair. The doctor told her she shouldn’t take those pills when she was going to sleep, because of her apnea. Apnea wakes you up when you stop breathing, so depressants deprive your brain of oxygen for longer. Make you wake up less when you stop breathing.

“If I just go to sleep and don’t wake up,” she says, dozing in the chair as I’m walking to my bedroom, “just say ‘good for the old girl. She held out as long as she could.’ There’s not so much good after sixty-eight.” I wonder if maybe she’s right, but I tell her she shouldn’t take those pills so late. She should get up and make some coffee. Take a shower. Something to keep her up for a while. She’s fallen asleep before after a whole Atavan, and she only took half. But still, why risk it. Mostly I just want to tell her not to talk like that, because, accidentally maudlin as it might be, it makes me so damn sad.

And I sit in bed and think about her funeral. About the stupid, fake speech some middle-aged Jesus freak will give, and wonder if my brother Chris would be allowed. I think a few bloody thoughts, about various things, and also a bit about what, if anything, I’d say. And I think about this e.e. cummings poem that she wants read at her grave, and how fucking sad it makes me to think about my mother’s grave.

And my dad’s up again, and she’s just going to go out to breakfast with him. He’ll eat more salt and sugar at a restaurant breakfast than he should really have all day, but I can’t stop him- just hope time moves slower.

I don’t feel the planet shift under my feet.

-fader