Pathfinder

What I’ve got to do is learn to be better with street names.

Bear with me, but the story goes like this. I think I need new glasses. Since my job involves staring at a computer screen and editing text all day, my company will pay a portion of the cost of reading aids. But, to get that assistance, the company doctor needs to test my eyes and sign a form. Usually he comes to the office every couple of weeks for anyone who wants a test. Since no one is in the office these days, difficulties presented themselves.

I tracked him down and we agreed I would come to his office on Monday. He told me the address and I figured out roughly where it was and then headed off by bike, because I wanted a little exercise that day.

Now I knew as I biked off that it was further north in Berlin, in the direction of the neighborhood where Colin’s hospice is. What I didn’t realize until I was almost there was that he was just down the street. I biked down the street where we went to a street fair about a week before he died. I still can’t quite process that. My son laid dying and we went to a street fair. But he was also unresponsive at that point and I had two other kids who needed some time outside. As the nurses in the hospice pointed out, *I* needed some time outside. But still, back when people did things outside together, there were the memories of me walking down this street, knowing that while we debated with the kids about getting on the trampoline that Colin was days or weeks from dying a couple of blocks away.

Then I biked through the grounds of the small palace, where they would often send us when we needed a break and where there was a cafe/truck that served pretty good cake. Emma and Noah found a hollowed out tree on those grounds and still talk about the amazement of realizing they could fit themselves inside a tree.

Then I biked past the grocery store, which wasn’t so much a grocery store during those months in hospice, but a place you could escape to and pretend that things were a little bit normal. Because we were fed pretty adequately at the hospice. There was no need to go on an Oreo run, but sometimes that was better than being in the hospice.

And then I saw the restaurant we went to a couple of times when we got him to sleep at a decent hour and then the bookstore where Christina would buy distractions for Emma and Noah and the post office from where I mailed the never-ending medical forms while we were locked up there and the bakery where I bought a Coke the day Emma, Noah and I went into the woods with the art therapist and painted a tree.

It was quite a trip down memory lane, one which I wasn’t really prepared for. Between that and the fact that I was a touch late for the appointment, I was a bit riled up when I got there and probably TMI’ed the doctor – whom I know I’d told about Colin’s death – that the neighborhood has a lot of weight for me. He said he had no idea and gave me my form.

And I don’t know what to do with this. If I had any memory of streets, the moment he said Grabbeallee I would have known I was near the hospice. I mean, for God’s sake, that’s the name of the tram stop where I got off the tram most days when I went up there by public transportation, during that long month and a half where I was home keeping the kids in school, Christina was in the hospice with Colin and I bopped back and forth across Berlin every day.

So, I don’t know what to make of all that, other than that the memories are still very close to the surface, which I never doubted. Maybe the lesson is that I need to keep myself permanently better prepared, but I don’t know how one lives like that. So I guess the only lesson is that I need to try to remember street names and, honestly, we all know that’s now how my brain works.