He falls asleep shortly after I feed him. While he eats, he has the penetrating look of a serious child. He chews slowly, with great deliberation. He grabs my hand, the one holding the bottle to his lips, when he drinks.
It all breaks my heart. There is a picture of Burt at 16 sitting on a chair in a field. I have often said he looks like a heartbreaker. I had no occasion to have my heart broken by that beautiful boy. This one does so now.
He is asleep at 8am but at 4 I heard him talking. He spoke rather sharply and crossly then. While I fed him around 7, he was nothing but gentle if inquisitive kindness. At 4, I stopped by his bed with my customary greeting of “I love you;” I was only there since he was evidently awake. He wasn’t speaking with me; all the boisterous conversation was for the phantasms in his world.
My heart breaks at having to acknowledge that he is mostly in his own world.
It breaks at being excluded and outside that space, although my head is grateful not to be enveloped in his hallucinations.
My heart breaks at how often I am obliged to answer with a neutral “I don’t know” or “My, that’s interesting” simply because I don’t understand what he’s saying.
It breaks because I am on the lookout for something in his words that might be alarming to him. I want to sense and stave off fears he might be garbling at me.
At one moment, when I heard him distinctly ask “What should I do?,” I said oh you’re good, you don’t have to do anything. My heart felt relief that that relieved him, and, yes, it was also once again breaking.
this is our life 