Ella
It is disconcerting – and scary – to sit across from a human being who is there but not there. But I want to feel something other than pity, or fear. And so I begin to think that for her, these endless self-conversations might be comforting. She is alone, closed off to the world by blindness and age and dementia, half awake, half alive. But the half that is alive is alive. It is reaching out, or maybe reaching back, to capture experience, to re-create it, to make sense of it, to work it through. She is not finished living. She is just finished living with others.
I get up quietly. I do not touch her as I leave. She keeps talking.