Feeling Fidgetty

With things so touch-and-go for my father-in-law, we’ve had a lot of trouble focusing around here. Each time the phone rings, my stomach drops. There’s a sort of unsettledness that you feel when someone you love is slowly dying. Aside from the obvious emotional upheaval, there’s a constant sense of unfinished business, of things left undone that should be done, of waiting to grieve. So I’m feeling (to borrow the word that my father-in-law kept using when asked how he was feeling) fidgetty. (Fortunately morphine has been administered for days now and now he is resting comfortably.)

To fight my own fidgets and yet keep the work coming (they don’t offer morphine to the family), I’ve decided to write continually on a group of stories, one sentence at a time, advancing each one incrementally. I know a little bit about what I want them to be (they’ve been kicking around in my head for a while) and I’m not sure if this will be for another collection, or what, but at least it’s helping to counteract my fidgets and giving me lots of things to focus on other than the dying.