Norah: “ When I get older and know chemistry, I’m going to make a cure for lung cancer.”
Fergus: “And the best part is, that will take you years. And by then they’ll have invented time travel.”
Norah: “And I can go back in time and—“
Fergus: “—You can say, ‘Granddad, drink this, it will make you feel better!’”
(As reported by Lauren)
(Isabel and Matt)
…When they come out, she is facing him,
walking backwards in front of him
and holding his hands, pulling him,
when he stops, reminding him to step
when he forgets and starts to pitch forward.
She is leading her old father into the future
as far as they can go, and she is walking
him back into her childhood, where she stood
in bare feet on the toes of his shoes
and they foxtrotted on this same rug.
I watch them closely; she could be teaching him
the last steps that one day she may teach me.
At this moment, he glints and shines,
as if it will be only a small dislocation
for him to pass from this paradise into the next.
-Excerpted from “Parkinson’s Disease,” by Galway Kinnell (b. 1927)
As I helped my nephew care for my dying father this morning—sponge bath, change of shirt, that sort of thing—it struck me that my father has begun to look like a study by Da Vinci or Durer. Here are the half-skeletal legs of a dying man, the loose flesh over his skull, the nose, ears, and even eyebrows showing decades of—of what? Of wear? Of gravity? My father, naked on a rented hospital bed—startling, a little scary, but beautiful, like an old, old master sketch in charcoal or conte crayon, monochromatic, basic, and illustrating something essential.
