deep in the ocean, there lies a wave for you

I am working on my book and digging through old Clark memories so much that it seems pointless and unhelpful to me to continue to write solely about him here. Though the book proposal process is moving way more slowly than I initially thought (maybe because it’s hard? who knew!), I’m chugging along. Before I write a new “part,” I have to go through the Google Calendar and my Gmail to create a sort of timeline of events, and creating that sequence of events drains me. But I am writing as fast as I can. The last part I wrote, in fact, was called “the best” so far by one Miss Jessica Guilfoyle.

I attempt to be amusing on my Tumblr, but that’s short form, people, and I have lots of things to say. So I am going to blog about lots of things here from now on, I have decided.

One last Clark(ish) bit, though: Did you read this weekend’s Times article on how psychedelic drugs can help the dying face death? Though Clark’s exhaustion after rounds of excruciating treatments helped him to accept his fate at the end, I think about the nightmares he had the week before he died, the pot smoke his lungs absorbed during the months he received treatment, and know this kind of thing would have eased his anxieties. Also, it probably would’ve given me a little comfort in the aftermath.

“I now have the distinct sense that there’s so much more,” said one patient, “so many different states of being. I have the sense that death is not the end but just part of a process, a way of moving into a different sphere, a different way of being.”

Uh, yeah, that would have definitely helped.

So many feelings about this story of a man who killed his Alzheimer’s-stricken wife before killing himself last week.

While this story is ultimately tragic because two people lost their lives, and Charles Snelling’s act was clearly carried out in desperation, I don’t feel overwhelmingly sad about the deaths. I cried because of what he must have endured in those six years he took care of her as her mental state deteriorated.

Though he murdered her, the couple had been together for 55 years. I’m not sure if I feel that commitment justifies his actions, but he was the most equipped of anyone to make any call about her condition. I cannot assume to know, even slightly, the effects of watching the love of your life fade away like that.

I very much admire the Snelling family, who must be experiencing incredibly grief, but who issued a statement saying that Snelling had acted “out of deep devotion and profound love.”

“This lady rescued me from a fate worse than death, and for a long, long time,” Snelling wrote in a Times piece months before this incident, before deciding that for her to stay alive was worth than death. Would it had been brave of him to continue to care for her? Yes. But was he brave to decide not to? Yes.