Last day

It's the last day of the year, and I've gotten up relatively early and made myself a cup of Irish Breakfast Tea. I'm not really a tea drinker. It seems to have arrived with the new kitchen floor. The birth of civilization. When it was a torn and filthy vinyl sheet, Thunderbird was the beverage most apropos. 

I'm thankful for this year's home improvements. Thankful, also, for getting out of management in a soulless and sick health care delivery system. Grateful for several experiences that shined a light on my life and my history and inspired some long overdue changes. I'm grateful for my family, its health and its resilience. I'm grateful for a couple of distant voices who I think of as friends. 

Thankful and grateful but not attached. I won't walk the tracks this year behind a long-gone train. I can let it go. Thank you and goodbye, good year. 

The other day, while my car was up on the lift being operated on, I took a walk into the large fenced in area that once contained Rutland Heights State Hospital. It was closed for good back in the early 1990's  and the buildings were all torn down sometime in the interim. There are plans in effect to build a "lifestyle community" there now. One man was working on a bulldozer packing and leveling dirt into a buildable surface. The only thing remaining of the old state hospital was a rusted metal flag pole. 

There were a number of giant haunted oaks; a sinister-seeming, man-made pond; an upended wishing well made of stones imbedded in concrete; and a pile of broken sewage pipes installed in the late 1800's. The hospital had originally been a rural tuberculosis sanatorium in which a great deal of academic research was conducted. It was repurposed in the 1960's when TB had calmed down and new maladies had arisen to badger the people. Part of it became a hospital for the treatment of alcoholics. My father entered that program as a patient, following a family intervention involving my mother and both sets of parents, a few days before Christmas in 1972. He died there that very same night. He was thirty years old. I was six. Since it's been kind of a year of perceived spiritual growth for me, I wondered if I might be able to sense his presence while walking in there. 

I couldn't feel you there. Could you feel me? You know, I've still got a lot of questions. Six year olds don't really get satisfactory answers. Did you suffer? Were you afraid? Did you think about us? Was there time for feeling and thinking and remembering? 

My mother said she'd found a little blood in the sheets at home after you'd gone. A nurse friend of mine speculated that maybe it was esophageal varices. You were very thin and jaundiced. I'd been told you died of cirrhosis which is something that blows a lot of peoples' minds on account of your youth. To be completely honest, I've often wondered if you killed yourself there. If you did, I'm not mad about it now. I've always imagined you suffering something no one else knew or understood. Alone. That's the part that hurts most to imagine. 

Anyway, we have this weird town of Rutland in common. You came here, unplanned, without your young family, to die. I came here, unplanned, with my young family, to live. In the last twenty-five years, I've never really thought about that.