I've been working the past 2 weekends, with much help from my dear friend Paula, on my husband Paul's 'office', the room in our apartment where he once upon a time did work, file, ship, write, play solitaire, edit, and lay out Crawdaddy Magazine....
Paul hasn't asked about, nor stepped foot in that room for over 4 years, and he's 3 years now in the nursing home. I think it's time to make it my own room. But man, ...how hard it is to process all those piles of things. Process meaning: throw out, box, mail out to others. And then there are the things you don't really want to find, (not to mention the 7 year old bags of weed).
A random page, torn from a journal, dated Feb. 1, 2006 Paul wrote: " I'm feeling on the edge of some kind of madness-
unable to find J.L. tapes/cd's- again!
playing solitaire compulsively--
unsure what to do each day, each moment."
Very difficult to move through this stuff. So many things. A life that was lived. Who am I to make the decision to keep or to purge?
* * *
At any rate, we visited Paul at his nursing home Sunday....here's the flip book version.
I think to read your blogs too seldom. Seeing you twice in a week brought you back to the front of my mind, and then I saw a FB link to this entry this evening. So I've sat reading, catching up and marveling once again at the highs & lows you've lived in this extraordinary life. Paul led an extraordinary life as well. Perhaps even a charmed life... right up until it wasn't. He was a brilliant writer, that's well understood and recounted often. But he also married a brilliant writer. I don't know how often that's said, but it can't hurt to say it again. It's true. Just a thought that occurred to me again tonight...
ReplyDelete^^ I agree with Charlie :-)
ReplyDeleteI'm just seeing this today, the flipbook. It's good to see you together with Paul, and I can appreciate the strain you were going through.
ReplyDeleteI saw your more recent post about cleaning up Paul's office and hope to get a chance to listen to the concert session you posted recently.