Re-release: There must be time for this

Inspired by Ellen Bass’s “Laundry”

Hello beloveds,

The following is an essay I published last year about one of my dear friends at L’Arche, the intentional community I lived and worked at for the years following my undergrad. (Please take a look at the OBO glossary if you have any questions about that work!) F, the subject of this essay, is a teacher I’ve turned to as I’ve contemplated what a good life means for me, both before my diagnosis and now, in the after. I hope the wisdom of the poet and of my friend reach you where you are today.

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The following is a poem by Ellen Bass, titled “Laundry” published May 6, 2024 in The New Yorker.

The baby’s dragged the sheets to the kitchen

and now she’s stuffing them in the washer,

one hand lifting a wad of yellow cotton,

the other reaching down for more and more. Breathing heavy,

she’s feeding vast swaths by the armful,

bent halfway into the mouth of the machine,

a strip of skin exposed where her shirt’s ridden up,

an edge of diaper sticking out of her pants.

Who can watch a child and not feel fear

like static in the background or a tinnitus you try to ignore.

This morning, in the Times, I saw the galaxy leda 2046648–

each spiral arm distinct and bright against the dark ink. Light

from a billion years ago, just as the first

multicellular life emerged on Earth.

What are the not-quite-two years of this intent creature

in the sweep of time? Her quadriceps and scapula,

the alveoli of her lungs, twenty-seven bones of her hand

that evolved from the fin of an ancient fish.

And her scribbly hair sticking up from her first ponytail.

When she was in her mother’s body,

the California fires turned the air a smoky topaz

and the sun glowed orange on the kitchen wall.

Last month the floodwaters rose and seeped under the door.

Still, there must be time for this, to watch her—

hands deep into the doing, she’s wedded

to the things of this world.

When she stands, her sleeve slips down

and she pushes it up like any woman at work.

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Written May 2024

F is no child. He is, in fact, an “old man,” as he might say, fashioning himself a cane out of a stick and bending over, performing oldness as a true theater kid would. Though, you might call some of his wonder “childlike.” Also, his frustrations—but whether that’s dementia itself, F being F, or the way getting older can shorten the distance between our child-self and grown-up-self, who’s to say?

He sometimes looks like a baby, when he’s gone and taken the clippers to random patches of his short gray hairs until one of us notices and straightens it out, shaving it all clean off, leaving him pleasantly shorn. He runs his hand over it, pleased. He likes the feeling.

I rub shampoo into his short little hairs in our shared bathroom on this, my seventh trip with him—the first I’ve taken not as his paid caregiver, but as his friend. I recall the times on previous journeys when we’ve both needed the bathroom, perhaps at an airport. After helping him, I go to use the toilet, gesturing for him to spin around so he doesn’t see me. One time, he did so, and whistled. Covering his eyes theatrically. It made me chuckle.

Leaning over him while the water sprays down, muscle memory kicks in. Like getting the sand out of his ears is something instinctual.

Then, the face he makes when I use the handheld shower head to rinse off the shampoo: an absolute delight. His eyes squeezed shut, his mouth pulled into something between a grimace and a smile. In that moment, it’s the only feeling in the whole world, and it is good.

Still, three months have passed since I’ve spent time with him, and has he always moved so slowly? The stairs take him so long. It must have been so gradual in our nearly four years seeing each other every day that I didn’t much notice the slowness in his joints until now.

Still, three months have passed since I’ve spent time with him, and so much in our world has changed, even in that short time. Cruelty, violence, pain. I have been changed—by grief, collective and personal. I don’t always feel like I’ve changed for the better.

Still. At night, we sleep in twin beds, just feet apart. We’re good roomies; we both like to watch an episode or two of Grey’s Anatomy, which he calls “The Doctor Show,” before turning in. The drama is soothing. We’ve seen it all before.

So set is our little routine that on the last night of vacation, he stands up as the rest of us settle in to watch Sister Act II: Back in the Habit and walks toward the stairs, insisting, “C’mon. You me sleep.” Then, when I say, “No, buddy, I’m going to watch the movie,” when the assistant tells F that she can help him get ready for bed instead, F tries manually maneuvering me. First he tugs my arm, then my calf, then my foot. “C’mon. Please?” Then E farts and everything descends into chaos and laughter. F finishes the movie, begrudgingly, and walks me arm-in-arm down the stairs as the credits roll. Or, I walk him. I can’t tell.

That night, his CPAP machine comes unhooked, and I wake up having dreamt that the sound was the ocean. I crawl the few feet over to him and hook it back in, and his eyes find me, glinting, in the dark.

I do not ever want us not to share a planet—although, it was designed this way. We are both just tiny blips whose lives have crossed only astronomically briefly.

But, anyone can say that about anyone, right? And they haven’t met F, waking up giggling because he knows he’s at the beach. Stealing my left sandal when his breaks on the beach and thinking I wouldn’t notice. Greeting every stranger alive like immediate friends, even at a rest stop urinal in rural North Carolina. Buying perhaps his 700th elastic bracelet—this one with a shark on it. Graciously unpacking my suitcase after I had quite intentionally packed it up to leave, hoping we’d all change our minds and stay, I guess. 

I am wedded to the things of this world, the people of this world. Who wouldn’t be? Who wouldn’t be sure—who wouldn’t absolutely insist—that there is, indeed, time for this?

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Take care, sweet friends.

With love,

Liddy

PS: I don’t have a good thumbnail image for this story, so please take a look at my chaotic, delightful, ridiculous, alive garden that there must, indeed, be time for: