He had been working in the territory of hospice care the last year, and he had expected it to go on for another two, but it hadn’t, and these last three months he’d been living with the disappointment of losing his job, and also nearing death awareness, which he had learnt from was about journeys, meetings, and confusions, or as he preferred to put it, narrative disarray. On the subject of nearing death awareness the dying are our teachers, or so he had read, while Joey McCann had said that it was about the petit objet a, which, he then added, was always to be written in italics, and translations were not to be attempted, although everybody tried, the incessant asking what does it mean, the thing being what everybody ultimately desired.
Don’t try too hard, had felt like sound advice from one good friend, and better than hers, Are you depressed, she had asked, perhaps you need to see somebody, and the day after he had joked at that suggestion with another of his good friends. That was at one of their regular meetings and his friend had said, Maybe it is a spiritual crisis, What happens in a crisis, he thought, Yes, that’s right, you organise crisis meetings and you sort it out, which was the last thing he had in mind at that moment, his intentions like the stories he had tried to write being in disarray, and he was doing nothing about it at all, if crisis it was, nothing that is apart from listening, except like Joey McCann had said, Although the ears, unlike the lidded eyes, appear always to be open and unsheathed, it didn’t happen that way, things got in the way.
That was the work.