Windows open

A glorious blue-sky day, sunlight streaming in. Why couldn't we have had this weather for Malcolm's  memorial on Saturday? I’m photographing my front window at noon today because I have injections in my back this afternoon—a wonderful cocktail of steroids and things that make me numb. I'm so grateful that this procedure exists. The last injections lasted a year, very helpful. I’m asked not to bring anything of value because all my stuff has to go into a sack to wait for me while I wear a hospital gown and socks to the procedure. I'll walk home (in my own clothes, presumably without pain) afterwards. That blessing.

I’m reading Wave, by Sonali Deraniyagala, recommended by one of you. It’s heart-stopping and then heart-filling because it’s the story of the tsunami that took away her parents, her husband, and her children in 2004. So well written that I can’t put it down, it’s a great book for anyone who has lost anyone they love. 

It takes me right back to Palesa’s death in 2021: the numbness, the inability to speak or remember even how to turn on the taps for a shower. The book affirms every experience of loss, our inability to take it in, to know what it means. Death? What is that? How it makes everything else seem absurd. Pointless. How you plan to kill yourself. I am aware of the fourth anniversary of Palesa's death approaching in July. I was speaking of it to Sue yesterday.

I presume (for I haven’t finished it yet) it shows how you come back into your life. She wrote the  book, published in 2013, so you know that much of what happened to her before you start it. She must have made her way through it somehow. So I read, wanting to hear that story, appreciating her craft as I continue reading, spellbound.