"71" // Episode Six

You're listening to I Have No Process. I am your host, Nicholas England. This is the sixth episode of 71.

I don't believe in biography.

I don't think it's possible to really know anything about a person without having been there with them. To hear what they said the way they said it. To observe the peculiar expressions illuminating their face. Every interpretation is about the interpreter. If I tried to tell you about Janet England, I'd only end up telling you about myself. I simply can't get out of her way, if I'm the one who's doing the talking.

If you want to win a glimpse of who Janet was, then get out your ironing board and iron every pillowcase and bedspread you own. Put on Carly Simon's "Coming Around Again" and hum along, with your lips pursed and your clumsy hips swaying back and forth. When you finish, go into the kitchen and get a couple of thick slices of farmer's bread. Slice up some Gruyere, some white cheddar. Spread Sir Kensington's mayonnaise on the outside of the bread. Place the cheese within.

Heat up a skillet and make the best grilled cheese sandwich anyone ever had. Pour yourself a glass of iced tea and grab your laptop. Check your email, then your Facebook feed. Leave a new batch of comments on the latest crop of posts. Tell everybody what you told them yesterday. They look like they're having a great time. They're so beautiful. You love them. Take a call from your son's wife. Either son, it doesn't matter. Fawn on her in all the ways she deserves.

Embrace her with as much warmth as you radiate to your boys. Leave no doubt that she's your child as much as the ones you gave birth to. Then once you're off with her, call your ex-husband. Listen to him ramble. Temper his concerns with fondly shared memories. Remind him that he's your oldest friend. Thank him, as you always thank him, for providing you with the greatest joys in your life. Those two boys. After you take out the compost and balance your checkbook, remember to call your sister.

It's been a few days. In the late afternoon, read a few chapters of the latest Maisy Dobbs. Gaze out your library window toward Little Ascutney. Gaze out your library window toward Little Ascutney. Watch the daylight deepen across the tops of the trees. Come to think of it, your own writing needs a bit of review, doesn't it? Go find a bottle of wine on the baker's rack to decant. Then open up that latest piece you were working on. The one you plan on sending to your son for Mother's Day.

The one that goes like this. Three hours with you. Nyesha Arrington's Wilshire. Market, Del Mar. The Virginian, Buffalo. Forage and Chatter, Edinburgh. Akbar's, Glasgow. McHugh's, Belfast. Three hours of dining delight. Listening to you read your poetry, or an elegy, or your manuscript. Listening to you play your sax. Listening to you amuse your friends, or advise or comfort them. Listening to you explain a movie that I just didn't get, or make sense of something I cannot understand.

Three hours of pride. When I was recovering from surgeries, or feeling sad or scared or confused, you were always there. Holding my hand, easing my pain, giving me strength, making me laugh. Cooking me pasta with bacon and mustard, or helping give Jeff the boot. Many, many hours of gratitude. So much in common, so many wonderful memories. Every hour or three or more is a treasure held by me. I gave you life. You gave me joy and so much more, including an amazing daughter.

We've shared our love, deep and unconditional. From your beginning to my end. If you can manage all that, then you can manage this. A month later, on that son's birthday, put the finishing touches on that other piece you've been crafting for Writer's Group. The one you can't get out of your head. "Subconscious Premonition." Do we know things that we are not aware that we know? Early in my first pregnancy, I heard about nesting.

Supposedly a time near the end when an expectant mama gets a burst of energy and does crazy things to prepare for her baby. As my pregnancy progressed, I couldn't imagine such a thing. But sure enough, about a week before Max was born, at 10pm one night, and though feeling as large and awkward as a whale out of water, I started rearranging furniture. Heavy pieces, moving them from one bedroom to another, over raised thresholds, around corners, and through old narrow doorways.

My husband was downstairs engrossed in some show, couldn't hear a thing, and I didn't ask for help. This was my project. Just a few days later, in the same room I'd been rearranging, my water broke, and off we headed to the hospital at midnight. Twelve years later, my parents spent a week with my family in Encinitas, California. While my father was loading their car and preparing to drive an hour north to my sister's home in Costa Mesa, my mother came to my bedroom.

She held me, she told me how much she loved me, how proud she was of me, of the woman I had become, and the mother that I was to my sons. She asked me to try and be patient with my father. He'd always been difficult, and we had often butted heads as I got older. She and dad then spent a lovely week with my sister and her new husband, and the night before they were to drive home to Cincinnati, my mother had a heart attack at two in the morning, and by five a.m. she was gone.

She was perfectly healthy, no pre-existing conditions, no warning of any kind. Yet she had said to me all of the things she would have said had she known she'd never see me again. My sister shared a similar story. Lately, I have begun to wonder if perhaps I am experiencing a subconscious premonition. Wondering what is prompting me, motivating me, to make so many plans and preparations for my death.

I have had a will and trust for many, many years. First with Kent, as soon as Max was born, and then a new set of documents after my divorce. I am only sixty-nine, and in generally good health, with little cause to think my life will end in fewer than fifteen to twenty years. And yet, lately I have been making spreadsheets of all my belongings: artwork, furniture, jewelry; itemizing origin, purchase date and price, estimated current value, and whatever other information I know.

I have discussed plans with my sons about when I might sell my Vermont house and move to Seattle, where I will live with and be cared for by Nicholas and Alyssa. I can then invest the house proceeds in their properties, to relieve them of the hardship of having to dispose of a house and furnishings on the opposite side of the country. And any of my belongings that they might desire will already have been shipped to them.

I have also been actively trying to complete research on several lines of ancestry, label and copy or distribute the hundreds of photographs passed along to me by my mother, and prepare materials in an orderly fashion to be passed along to my unborn grandchildren and my great niece and nephew. I have family knowledge that no one else has, and if I don't do this, much will be lost to those future generations.

Now, I am always the first to admit that I thoroughly enjoy making spreadsheets and doing the research to complete them. And while it is very time consuming, I also enjoy working on the family history. But somehow, everything I am doing has a sense of urgency about it. Not simply that I need to do it, but that I need to do it soon, now. Maybe nothing more than my detail-oriented personality is prompting all of this planning and activity. We can hope so, but I guess either way, I'll be prepared.

Game 40, Padres 2, Dodgers 4, May 13, 2023 The dandelion swarms, sprouting across our grassy knoll, blow the whispered promise of their descendants throughout the air. These well-intentioned poems of ours pollinate fragments of ego everywhere. Game 41, Padres 0, Dodgers 4, May 14, 2023 I do not have the strength to go to you. I have always been meant to sit in the shade. It is quite a walk up that hill, I know. But I would rather talk here, if it is all the same to you.

Game 42, Royals 0, Padres 4, May 15, 2023 Wacha's three-pitch strikeout of Pasquantino delivers a smile, with the curvature of Cupid's taut bow, from my lips, to my thighs, to my giddy outstretched toes. I breathe in the expanse of total relaxation. The goodness of the familiar, letting me know my heart is safe at home. Rocking chairs on the porch. A cat warming itself in a curl by the kitchen door. Wacha's signature change-up, down and away.

Game 43, Royals 5, Padres 4, May 16, 2023 Tristan Gooley tells me that who you are is what you perceive and how you respond. As I watch Xander Bogaerts give up on becoming the tying run, the moment the Royals focus the whole of their attentions on Odor, helplessly stranded in a narrowing gap between first and second, Xander staring at home plate from third with the resolve of an opossum, my response is this. Game 44, Royals 4, Padres 3, May 17, 2023

I do not need what this ritual once thought to provide me. I accept my mother's death, without caveat and without a troubled heart. Everybody has to die. She is dying splendidly. Like the glorious bloom of the crabapple tree, passing in springtime, she is perfect. Meanwhile, the experience of watching this Padres team has grown soul-deadening. Its appointments having waned to a sad predictability.

One hundred thousand men left stranded every night. And yet, I have been determined from the beginning in nothing but the process, here to answer every dinner bell, no matter the sound. So, as I go on, now bereft of conscious purpose, what in this way might be disclosed? Game 45, Red Sox 6, Padres 1, May 19, 2023 Taking care of my mother as she dies has been such a wonderful stage on my path to giving up on the man I have always thought I was supposed to be.

I used to think a person's dignity never had to surpass that of a squirrel clinging to a tree. I don't do much thinking anymore. Game 46, Red Sox 4, Padres 2, May 20, 2023 Butter spatters black the silver pan, liquefying fat into mayhem. Steam vents of seared steak billow through the house. The women open every window, in part to while away their famished wait. A barrage of angst roils my head as I stare at nothingness.

The furnace urge to be spared, to escape the days, whatever meager tedium we have left. Game 47, Red Sox 0, Padres 7, May 21, 2023 Janet regurgitates her meal after the game's first pitch. For us, this is a threshold past. Tumbling over the ridgeline of a windswept dune. We will shift to a liquid diet, all the sweet calories of juices, blended things. But there will be no second scan to discern if the nausea is in her mind, her meds, or some constriction of her duodenum.

There is no calculation to make. No cause, no cure. Nothing to be done but to manage, endure. I take her / she holds my hand, and in that wordless gaze, we determine one another. Game 48, Padres 7, Nationals 4, May 23, 2023 Cronenworth's long ball is initially ruled a double, landing atop the wall, colliding near the grate. With tenured pessimism, we attend the ump's review, then are stunned when they affirm the challenge and reverse the call. A home run.

But wait, an old man in a Nationals jersey, standing near the locus of dispute, points emphatically at the top of the wall, challenging the challenge with the wag of his finger. Game 49, Padres 3, Nationals 5, May 24, 2023 I feel apologetic for any critical remarks I made before, regarding Garcia, Tatis, whomever. Their work is real, their efforts great. They endeavored through years of hardship to get where they are. Names recognized.

I've never worked that hard for anything, save self-preservation. Game 50, Padres 8, Nationals 6, May 25, 2023 I am not here to watch the Padres win, I am merely here to see them play. Which do you prefer, the stained glass of cathedrals, or a view of the craftsmen absorbed in their work?

Game 51, Padres 5, Yankees 1, May 26, 2023 As her eyes rolled back in her head, and her mouth curled into the frantic frown of a caged thing, shocked by a cosmic lightning bolt, smote by a massive stroke, before the paralysis took her right side, Janet asked her sister one last kindness. "Keep talking."