Devoirs

In June 2017 I left my job in California and flew back to my mother’s house in Virginia because her kidneys had failed and she was expected to die. But after ten days in hospital either unconscious or in pain, she revived and decided to accept a life severely restricted by the need for dialysis, ignoring her previous 49 years of insistance on no life-saving measures. After several months in a care facility, her kidneys started working on their own again, so in December 2017 she moved back into her home, where she would need 24-hour in-home care. While living in her house, I went through all her papers, first preparing for her death, then for her lifetime residing in a care facility, then for her life at home with 24-hour care. It was a stressful and lonely time for both of us. I tried to stay sane by going through the childhood things mom had saved in the attic, rereading all the science fiction and historical books I’d read between the ages of 9 and 13. I found an old lined work book from my days in high school in France, and started making a collage diary in it using material from my daily interactions with the medical institutions, from mom’s many handwritten notes and lists, and from those attic books. “Devoir” means “duty” or “obligation” in French. Mom died in 2020, and in 2021 I made a highly condensed Lulu book of this diary, remaking most of the collages and creating a much shorter and more dramatic version. In late 2023, I decided that the 2021 version was too dense and complicated, and not a good reading experience, so I scanned the entire original and set about making a new version more faithful to the original. In the end, I mostly did that, though I condensed a dozen weak pages into half as many better ones. I also used six or seven pages directly from the 2021 version, and I made numerous additions and edits to many of those and other pages. It’s probably still too personal a book to be very accessible to any reader but me, but it is more of a faithful record of my state of mind between June 25th and December 28th, 2017, and hopefully a better read as well.