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After V.
Change, time, sudden breaks, new landscapes. Familiar to me; but this now is after a long time of relative stasis. V.’s death coincided with finishing several things I’ve been working on for several months, and of course my increasing well-being over the past three months from the new medications; and considering, with increasing definiteness, moving…
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End
V. is gone. Actually not gone, but – going – they have decided that there is enough brain damage that even if she could be awakened it wouldn’t really be her. They are turning off machines tonight; she may continue breathing for a few days, but she really died on Monday evening, when she had…
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V.
Last night I got to hold V.’s hand for a long time – about an hour and a half, I guess. The experience is reassuring – her hands are clean and soft, and pleasant to hold, and there is movement from breathing (or perhaps from the respirator, but the effect is the same); the immediate…
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In hospital
The last few days: explaining V.’s condition (clearly serious, but who knows the future?) to a variety of people, interfacing between her husband and the university. An hour and a half sitting with her, by her husband, in the ICU tonight – we talked, and talked to her, etc. Actually it was nice to see…
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Real trouble
V. is extremely ill – a cardiac arrest in fact; she is unconscious in the ICU unit, and we don’t know whether she will recover. She has been, as it happens, ready for this – in fact she has had the most direct and unflinching ability to look at her condition and possible problems of…
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Signs
[Los Angeles, 1992] The session chair is standing, the first paper is over, and through a long wave of applause intended for someone else I move through a labyrinth of aisles towards the stage. I’m wearing khakis, emblematic of the Eastern aristocracy, the conservative controllers who went to school with me; shoes beige and just…
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Paul Attinello 