Things

The world feels eerily apocalyptic to me. Everything happened in one long weekend. A wedding of a dear friend. Visiting a cousin in the hospital after a major surgery. Another dear friend collapsing suddenly from diabetes and spending days in the ICU. The Pacific Northwest burning and burning, filling the skies with a melancholy haze.

The wedding getaway car against the smoke choked sky.

In a short span of time I went from having no stories to tell beyond “I spent nine hours on a tractor smoothing out some dirt,” to having many stories, but feeling too pained inside to tell them.

When someone I love is in the hospital, I want to rush in and fix things. But I can’t. I’m not a doctor. I’m not their mother. Depending on how tired the patient is, my showing up at the hospital could easily be a hindrance, not a help.

As Sarah Beth is living on her own far from most of her family, my mom spent a lot of time in the hospital with her. So I cooked and cleaned and tried to be the mother in place of my mother, who was being the mother in place of her mother, and hoped in some small way I was helping out my friend.

Sarah Beth was discharged from the hospital this afternoon and is now spending a few days in our spare room, as she recuperates and gets used to the necessary lifestyle changes inherent with diabetes.

…

I read a Truman Capote quote the other day: “Money gets in people’s bone marrow. The rich might give you a Rembrandt for Christmas, but if you need to borrow five dollars, well you’d better not borrow that from anyone who’s rich.”

Sarah Beth is the type of girl who will always lend you five dollars, no matter what. It’s interesting to see how, in her time of need, people swarm from the four corners of the earth to try and help. I honestly think that if she needed a million dollars, she would get it.