This morning, for reasons unexplained, Tanja’s breakfast was an hour delayed and her dedicated spoon lifter had to leave for other errands before it arrived.

Not a problem. She simply fed herself.

“And,” she added with some pride, “I held the silverware the regular way.”

That’s as compared the “adaptive” technique of gripping it in a fist.

After lunch she and I went for a walk around the ward. We set off at a blistering pace but had to pause part way through to rest… happily I caught my breath pretty quickly and we were off again.

Then, back in the room, she settled down for an afternoon nap.

Tanja and I have long differed on the value of napping. She feels like it’s time she’d rather spend doing something. I feel like I am doing something. I’m napping!

Now though she naps quite a bit. And, as with everything else, once she picked it up she mastered it really quickly—perfect fucking Tanja—so now she can slip into a restorative nap with astonishing alacrity.

Sometimes when she naps, her mouth is firmly shut and her face takes on the same expression she gets when she’s listening patiently to something dumb she is going to disagree with.

Other times, when the fatigue is greater and the nap is deeper, her mouth drops open and one can’t help but think of Conrad:

…I had a vision of him on the stretcher, opening his mouth voraciously, as if to devour all the earth with all its mankind…

But Kurtz never fell asleep cradling a plush bunny, like the one Tanja is using to retrain her hands the better to pet her cats. And Tanja doesn’t want to devour the earth. Not at all! She just wants to come home—an event she has only just started to allow herself to anticipate.

Tomorrow the hard work begins again.

But tonight here’s a tune with the right spirit, if not the exact right words. Plus, Clifford Brown and Maynard Ferguson on the same track, so you know anything is possible.

https://youtu.be/6v4fTR1yHd0