Tragic Head

I have washed two jackets of Rob’s and the murdering shoes he wore when he fell. I’m putting them in the charity bin. (I am moving very slowly even though I feel the need to get everything in order.) I have also decided to do the last Paris market at the end of the month but with a much reduced load. I am taking along a younger friend. She will hopefully stop me from doing something stupid. I am doing stupid things all the time and, according to Didion,  that’s normal during this year of magical thinking. Still I don’t like it. 

Oh a happier note, for the past few weeks I’ve been doing Tai Chi on the Esplanade at 7:30 every morning. This is a discipline or rather martial art that I’ve always wanted to learn. Some kindly spirit must have decided that I've suffered enough and so sent an American artist teaching at a school in the village who is also an advanced student of Tai Chi. He kindly allowed me to join a number of his art students. The damn shingles refuse to vacate my head so I am struggling to keep up and balance on one leg but still I persevere. At the very least, it gets me up and dressed in the morning. (The art teacher is taking a week off between classes and so I am trying to memorize the moves with the help of a YouTube video.)

Everyone seems to be dying or complaining about the ailments of old age. How I hate it but am I any better? I went for a picnic and to an art gallery last Sunday with Susan (who just turned 95) and David (13 years younger) and the picnic in the rose garden was pleasant enough but after, wandering through the halls and rooms of the old abby (Beaulieu-en-Rouergue), the only painting I noticed was one nicknamed by the artist’s wife “Tragic Head”, a watercolour executed with long quick brushstrokes with, what appears to me, hollow eye sockets and a dissolving mouth. Death, fucking death, takes whoever it damn well pleases.

Literally Crazy

“Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death.... We might expect if the death is sudden to feel shock. We do not expect this shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind. We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe their husband is about to return and need his shoes.” ― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

I have had a couple of bad days. No, I have had a lot of bad days. I cannot write. I cannot sort myself out. Today, Fauci caught a little bird and put her under the dining room table. At first, I thought the bird was dead and then it flew to the window and Fauci flew after it. I screamed at the damn cat to leave the bird alone. I ran to the window and opened it and the little bird flew away. A sigh of relief. I usually yell for Rob to come to the rescue but he is not at home. If he were, he'd be proud of me.