There are times when, even now, even after two years, even after writing a damn BOOK about it…
…I can’t believe that she did it.
Stopped eating and drinking. Referring to you-know-whom.
I think it especially today, since I was a damn fool this morning. Took off for a walk at 10AM on possibly the hottest, most sun-blazened (sorry, computer—it’s a word now!) path in the city.
OK—I wasn’t completely stupid. I had bought a bottle of water. I made sure that I was drinking it—a surprising number of people don’t. I was wearing sun-glasses. But at a certain point, the sun and the insomnia of the night before got to me.
I dove into the bushes and sought shade.
It was a purely physical reaction—as reflexive as jumping back when the scorpion lifts its tail. So I sat in the bushes, and wondered how I was going to get out.
A couple walked by—should I ask them for help? I do have a history of manhunts at El Morro.
I followed them, instead. And I eventually made it home.
So it was a minor thing. But it left me panting and exhausted. And contemplating, again, the amount of will that an 89 year-old lady—my mother—must have exerted, those two years ago.
“It hasn’t been too bad,” she said, in that last week, referring to the fast. But now I wonder—how could it not have been? 
(Thanks to
Erica Iris for these images….)
