Day of Dusk, 16th of Childwinter, 525 M.E. (Deneb): White Ferlinghetti clouds are scudding over Lowell today and in the Merrimack’s shrouded waters, the birch-white face of a madonna is shadowed by streetlight. In a secret garden in a private place, a nightbird's song echoes outside a Lowell window. 

The deep sound of a woman singing a broken melody in a shuttered room in an old wood house in Lowell as the world cracks by, thundering like a lost lumber truck on a steep grade.

These words are adapted from Lawrence Ferlinghetti's Canticle of Jack Kerouac, written in 1987. Today, they resonate with me, even in this bastardized form, as I think of my elderly mother, her lungs filling with pneumonic fluids, her body refusing to accept the oxygen the hospital provides, still clinging to life despite the fact that she's crossed a point of no return. There's nothing more we can do for her, they tell us, and are providing her with comforting hospice care and company and morphine. Sadly, she's been in this agonized state for some five days now.

For the record, she's in a private room in a hospital in Methuen, Massachusetts and not some old wood house in nearby Lowell. But still, the mood of the imagery seems to fit the current situation. It's so lonely here in Atlanta, I guess (to misquote another bard), with her in Methuen, it's almost like living in Lowell.

To quote (correctly) a third bard, David Berman, "When the dying's finally done and the suffering subsides, all the suffering gets done by the ones we leave behind."