The long goodbye

It has been a week.

My senses are out of kilter as to time and place. I will think it is Tuesday when it is Monday. Saturday when it is Friday and vice-versus.

The house feels larger even with Izzi staying here. We rattle around. Marveling at how tall the ceilings seem. At how many people were able to fit comfortably in the living room when we sat Shiva on the Monday and Tuesday after Jed’s death.

With Jed at home, the rooms had always seemed balanced. His large frame occupying the space. Balancing out the height and width and breadth even in his last weeks lying in his hospital bed. His presence still filling the rooms with echos of his insouciant smiles or his coquettish turns in one or another doorway.

Jed standing tall was a marvel. His posture perfect but tinged with a languidness that harkened back to the Wyoming roots of his General father. And yet Jed was a true Easterner. Intelligent and smart and fast thinking from all his years spent in New York City. At home, on a sailboat or a kayak or climbing a mountain or walking the G-trails of Europe or sitting at Puffy’s Bar or writing one article or another for the New York Times, or sharing a pint of ice cream with Izzi. Talking politics or mycology or the origins of fire as the basis for the industrial revolution.

Frontotemporal Dementia robbed him of so much of that. Slowly. Insidiously. Painfully. As a horrible march down the rottenest of fetid paths lined with the scary monsters of childhood nightmares. Still, there were things he could hold onto. His three quick kisses to the air when one or another of us came into view.

The whispered, “I love you.”

The moment of sudden lucidity in his last week when he looked at Izzi and said, “I’ll be there.” For Izzi. For the milestones and triumphs in Izzi’s life to come. His fatherhood still there at the last.

The sway of his body as music played.

Jed still in there a little. Struggling to breath. To live and release enough to pass on.