Still Reading

From Benediction by Kent Haruf, a family deals with the dying of their loved one:

THE NEXT MORNING Mary lay in the old soft double bed with Dad [the character’s name is “Dad Lewis”] until the sunlight streamed into the room. She got up and went into the bathroom and returned and put on her shirt and jeans and leaned close over the bed to look at him.
Dear. Are you waking up now? He didn’t move. Dad?
He lay staring up at the ceiling out of half-open eyes. Then he breathed deeply, a kind of rattle. She felt his forehead. He felt cool, clammy to the touch.
Can you hear me? she whispered.
She bent and kissed him and went quickly upstairs to Lorraine’s room.
Honey, can I come in?
Lorraine had just gotten out of bed in her light summer nightgown.
What’s wrong?
He’s going now. I’m afraid he is.
Is something different?
He won’t wake up. I can’t get him to talk. He feels cold.
Lorraine put her arms around her. We knew this was coming, Mom.
Come down with me, would you. I want to turn him on his side. The nurse said he’d breathe a little better on his side if we turned him.
Lorraine put on a robe over the nightgown and followed her mother downstairs. Dad’s eyes were shut now. He breathed and stopped and breathed again, rattling in his throat. They folded back the summer blanket and the sheet and turned him so he was facing the door, and placed an old flat pillow under his head, and put another between his knees. His feet looked mottled with blotches climbing up his legs and his hands were blue and on the undersides of his arms were more blue spots that were like faint bruises.
Look at his poor fingernails, Mary said.
Yes.
They covered him again with the sheet and blanket and stood together beside the bed, watching him. His mouth stayed open. He breathed and made a little involuntary noise and breathed again.
He never woke that day. He lay quietly in the bed, his mouth open and dry and his lips cracked, his face yellow and washed out. Lorraine called the nurse and she came and examined him and looked at his feet and hands, the blue places and mottling on his arms and legs, and told them he was in the final stages. They talked about what they should do. They said they would bathe and dress him themselves after he died, they preferred that, they wanted that last duty and moments of caretaking for themselves, and the nurse said, That’s fine. But you still need to call me so I can certify his death and dispose of the unused medicine. When you’re ready we can call the mortician. But there’s no rush. You take as long as you want.

Reading this brought back the memories of my Dad’s final days. He died on 17 March last year.

And then, from To A Mountain in Tibet by Colin Thubron:

Then, as if licensed at last to voice a pent-up question, he asks: ‘And you? Why are you doing this, travelling alone?’

I cannot answer.
I am doing this on account of the dead.
Sometimes journeys begin long before their first step is taken. Mine, without my knowing, starts not long ago, in a hospital ward, as the last of my family dies. There is nothing strange in this, the state of being alone. The death of parents may bring resigned sadness, even a guilty freedom. Instead I need to leave a sign of their passage. My mother died just now, it seems, not in the way she wished; my father before her; my sister before that, at the age of twenty-one.
Time is unsteady here. Sometimes I am a boy again, trying to grasp the words Never, never again. Humans, it is said, cannot comprehend eternity, in time or space. We are better equipped to register the distance spanned by a village drumbeat. The sheerness of never is beyond us.
The sherpa’s eyes stay mute on me, puzzled. Solitude here is an unsought peril. I joke: ‘Nobody’s fool enough to travel with me!’
It is already evening. Our feet grate over the stones. You cannot walk out your grief, I know, or absolve yourself of your survival, or bring anyone back. You are left with the desire only that things not be as they are. So you choose somewhere meaningful on the earth’s surface, as if planning a secular pilgrimage. Yet the meaning is not your own. Then you go on a journey (it’s my profession, after all), walking to a place beyond your own history, to the sound of the river flowing the other way. In the end you come to rest at a mountain that is holy to others.
The reason for this is beyond articulation. A journey is not a cure. It brings an illusion, only, of change, and becomes at best a spartan comfort.

Like Walter Mason, I like to read about things before (or even while) I do them. As he puts it (more eloquently than I just did):

I suffer that great affliction of all bookish people: Before I embark on any activity I need to read at least one book about it. Perhaps it betrays a lack of imagination, but I think it more likely that it exposes a deep-seated sense of insecurity. I find it quite impossible to approach anything in the spirit of virgin experience. No matter what, I have to study up on it a little.

And if I don’t manage to read about things before I experience them, and am too distracted during the event to read, I usually find I can recall the experiences by reading about them after.

Benediction and To A Mountain in Tibet have both been comforting in their own ways.