Halloween 2023
I woke up in the early hours of the morning, trying to remember how to spell a word. It is a common, simple word, but the letters eluded me. As I drifted through the fog of liminal suspension between wakefulness and sleep, I sifted through the letters to piece this word together. Like the old fashioned square wooden children’s blocks, with a letter carved and painted on each one, I would choose one and try it out to see if it would fit.
N – I am pretty sure it starts with n. Nmt? The sound is right, but something is missing. Nemt. Almost, I’m getting close as I drift off to sleep again for a while. As my daytime consciousness begins to stir again, I add another letter. Nemte? No, that isn’t quite right…. Then suddenly the whole word shows up, complete and brilliant – Empty! There it is, and I feel triumphant in finding it. The word, empty rolls around in my head, as thoughts of the day begin to interrupt my slumber. Empty, empty, empty. Such an impish sort of a word.
I’m not sure why this word puzzle was my first thought of the day. This may be a new twist in the neuronal disturbances happening in my brain. It is a bit disconcerting to lose the ability to spell, but at the same time, there is a certain naïve curiosity that comes with the not knowing. To try and rebuild a word from scratch and phonetics, it really does expose the empty nature of language itself – how we give meaning to these letters and turn them into nouns, verbs, pronouns and the like.
When I was writing a note to mail to my granddaughter for Halloween this week, I included a knock- knock joke. One of the word games she adores. I knew how to spell knock – knock, but the spelling came out scratched up and some of the letters were out of place. The K and N in the first knock were merged, one on top of the other. The C went missing in the second knock. At first I felt frustrated that I had ruined this lovely Halloween card I had just purchased for her with my misspelled joke. I shrugged my shoulders and kept going, scribbling words, or facsimiles of the words that I meant to write. I really wanted to share this card, and the knock- knock joke with her. As I sent this off in the mail, I wondered what she and her Mom, my grown-up daughter, would think of my deteriorating ability to write a simple note. I realized that this is a part of my new reality, and there is no shame in sharing that with them.
I know this may pain my daughter to see new evidence of my decline. But I am not going to hide it from her. I don’t want to deny her the grieving process that accompanies each of these losses. There is loss not only for me, but for all those who care about me. I can’t deny them their rightful grief, even if it hurts my heart to know I am causing them pain. My wish is that this pain, this loss, will become a part of their tapestry of understanding life as impermanent, precious and fleeting so that they can embrace and let go simultaneously each and every moment with grace and appreciation.