dyin'

There are things I will need to record as I spend my days in this place. In the mission statement (any company has one nowadays) it says: "nobody wants to come here." I spent some time today with an old woman who wants to go home. She wants to go home so bad that she's losing her mind. And she doesn't get it that she can't. She can go to somebody else's home and be a foster person. She can go somewhere else. But nowhere else is home. And the trouble is, she has no idea where she is, but she has just enough left to know where she isn't. And it isn't really even there anymore. Home. The farm. She spent 60 years in the same house and I can't convince myself to convince her that this is okay, that this alternative living is a little like home. The only thing that is like home is that she's there. It is not not not home.

I sat with another woman today who said, "I look down the hallway and I see the line of old women in chairs and my body won't do what I want it to and I wonder what is next for me." We wonder together which is better, to lose the body or the mind, and neither of us know, but she is closer to knowing. She used to be a hairdresser and vanity left her a long time ago.

And they are dying, one by one by one, and I didn't want to do this anymore and I don't know how long I can.