Coincidentally, as my mom began it get sicker, or less able I suppose, my husband began reading Slaughterhouse Five. It’s a book that has captivated me since I first read it, and every time I pick it up, I get something new from it. I can’t really explain it well, though I’ve tried to Bob, and it was a significant part of my masters thesis, so it’s not like I haven’t had practice.

Bob and I have talked about the book quite a bit since he started reading it, so it’s very top of mind for me. He bought me this lovely hardcover copy from 1967 that still has its original paper jacket.

There’s a lot I know I want to write about, about my mom and her decline and death. But there’s not any possible way to write it down. I’ve thought about it from every angle, and I just can’t see my way clear to do it.

I picked up Slaughterhouse Five this afternoon because I knew there was something in it I wanted to reference, but I couldn’t remember what it was. I couldn’t remember what part it was in, or what it was even about, but I wanted to look at that passage. I have probably read this book 15 times, but haven’t read it in years now.

All of this happened, more or less. I came back to work yesterday after being away for maybe a month or so. I went on leave when we took my mom to the hospital for the first time, and more or less didn’t leave the hospital (except to sleep) for the next couple of weeks. Then I was on leave for planning the wake, funeral, and reception with my sisters and dad. Then I was on leave because I needed to be. And now I’m back.

When I was reading Slaughterhouse Five today, when I’m supposed to be working (or time I had earmarked as “work time,” I suppose), I realized that the first chapter starts with what I had wanted to read. Or needed to read. I look at my browser sidebar and see that I have seven blog posts from various friends that I missed while I was on leave, and that I want to read. I want to curl up and press my face up against the real life of my friends in short vignettes; these things that are so manageable. Focus is my problem, but it’s not the real problem.

The part of Slaughterhouse I wanted to read is, like I said, at the start of chapter one. It goes like this:

I would hate to tell you what this lousy little book cost me in money and anxiety and time. When I got home from the Second World War twenty-three years ago, I thought it would be easy for me to write about the destruction of Dresden, since all I would have to do would be to report what I had seen. And I thought, too, that it would be a masterpiece or at least make me a lot of money, since the subject was so big.

But not many words about Dresden came from my mind then — not enough of them to make a book, anyway. And not many words come now, either, when I have become an old fart with his memories and his Pall Malls, with his sons full grown.

And from there Vonnegut writes about self-fulfilling, cyclically infinite eternity. He doesn’t say that, per se, but the Yon Yonson ditty, (similar to Henry the Eighth, I am I am) holds the end in the beginning, though of course you don’t know that until you have reached the end. Slaughterhouse Five follows the same narrative structure. And life does the same, which he reminds us with “and so it goes.” At the end is the beginning.

Anyway, the part of the book that I wanted was the part about the hole in the heart of the narrative, which is the destruction of Dresden. Because Vonnegut didn’t have a way to start writing about it, even though he lived through it. All he had to do was report it. I remember reading something way back in the early days of YouTube about how every minute something like 100 hours of content were added to YouTube. That’s sort of what it’s like. Every minute you’re in the hospital, you’re adding 100 hours of layers of everything that defy explaining. There’s no explaining. It’s more feeling and sound. And how do you tell someone about that? Well I certainly don’t know.

I’m not an old fart in Cape Cod with my Pall Malls and my sons full grown, but I have my own version, which is reading my friend’s blog posts, and magazines, and doing the crossword. Vonnegut talks about how he would get drunk at night and call up old war friends, because you really do need to talk, even if neither of you can say the words. My version of this is that I’ve been talking to everyone. The neighborhood moms, my friends from high school and college, and most of all Bob. I have been back at work two days and I’ve had such an outpouring of love from my colleagues that I am quite nearly reduced to a mass of nonsense. It makes me realize that you never know what someone else is going through (so many similar stories), and that being honest about not being in a good place is better than doing my mother the disservice by papering over the reality.

All of this isn’t quite right, but it is what I have right now, so it will have to do. One question I can’t shake and don’t really want or need an answer to is, when was the last time my mother knew who I was? It was prior to last November. At that neurology appointment she didn’t know who I was. But she was always happy to see me and the kids, and if that isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.