But today it did.
Thank you for coming back—or for finding your way here for the first time. However you arrived, I’m glad you’re here.
Hallo Kartoffelkumpel,
With record rainfalls happening, I thought you might like a rainy-day post. I contributed this article to The Memoirist, so if you’ve already read it I hope you enjoy it a second time. I’m reproducing my original article below so you can still read it in your inbox, but I really recommend checking The Memoirist out. Then come back and ask me about some of my favorite authors and posts!
The sky had been thin and brittle all morning, the clouds stretched tight like old linen.
I noticed it while putting on her shirt. It had the print of some cartoon from some show we’ve never watched. Buttons and bows had been too much so this is what we wore now. Simpler, faster to get on and off. She sat, or rather reclined, slumped on the edge of the couch, her head tilted slightly, a faint twitch at the corner of her eyes.
I knew that twitch.
“You okay?” I asked, voice soft, pretending it wasn’t what I thought it was.
She didn’t answer.
I could smell the eggs going way past over easy in the kitchen. The fork rested on the plate like a downed white flag. I knelt there, the eighteen inches between us feeling like miles. She blinked slowly, her eyes clouding over. I felt the shift, the earth tilting, the room around me disappearing.
And then it began.
I already had my phone out ready to start timing. Her body stiffened, arms jerking with mechanical violence. I eased her down to her left side. Then the sounds. At first the delicate crinkle of medication tabs being opened, then the sharp, wet click of her teeth snapping shut, the guttural rasp of breath trapped somewhere between her chest and her throat as she fell deeper into the throes. I dissolved the meds in one of the thousands of syringes always in reach, popped open her g-tube port, connected the line, vented, connected the syringe, and slowly pushed.
Once that’s done I just sit there with my useless hands and racing heart, pounding with the same panicked rhythm it always did. Counting seconds and losing years.
When it was over she was hollowed out, a fragile shell with her breath shallow and quick.
That’s when the sky opened up.
It doesn’t rain here much but today it did. The rain was beating hard against the glass. A steady drumming, like the headaches you get behind the eyes. There were about two sips left in the coffee mug. The smoke from breakfast, forgotten at first and then burnt, started to drift in from the kitchen. Outside, the world dissolved into gray, the downpour smearing it into nothing. Inside, there was silence. A heavy, suffocating silence, broken only by the low, insistent drip of whatever was on the television.
She was there, on the couch, barely stirring. Her breath was still shallow but steady, her face pale against the cushions. The seizure had come and gone, quick and brutal, leaving her crumpled and creased in its wake. I watched it, like always. The rigidity, the tremors, the violence of it all. And then the stillness. That damned unbearable stillness that followed.
Our protocols said if she has another one inside of 15 minutes we give a dose of the heavy stuff. Protocols. What a cold tasting word. Either way I wasn’t going anywhere so I tried to read. Hemingway. Always Hemingway. Words cut so clean you could shave with them. But now, even his words felt worn down, the edges dulled. They hung there on the page, ghosts of something that was once clarifying. When the lucidity of Hemingway doesn’t work I usually reach for the reassurance of Rilke or Elliot, hell even Horace. But her hand had found mine and would have to let go reach one of them. So I turned to the TV. It moaned in the corner with news of wars, celebrities, things to buy, in other words: disasters. A thousand voices fighting to fill the empty spaces. But the noise only made the emptiness grow, sprawling and endless. The phone was busy with its postictal timer. All of it seemed obscene. This struggle to distract, to drown the ache with static and sound.
My mind tried to build a story. Stories were the handholds on the cliff face. They were the maps in the woods. They gave shape to the shapeless, a reason to keep moving. But the stories fell apart, crumbled like dry leaves underfoot. Logic was useless, reason even more so. What was left was the yawning space where meaning used to be.
I looked at her again. The curve of her cheek, the way her hair spilled over the pillow. She looked so much like herself in these moments. But she wasn’t. Not entirely. The life I had imagined had been seized, torn apart piece by piece. What was left wasn’t less, but it wasn’t the same either. I thought of her laughter. The way sunlight turned her hair to gold. The feel of her hand in mine, not strong but weighty. And now, there was only her delicacy. Quiet and resting, her body betraying her in ways I couldn’t stop.
It doesn’t rain here much but today the rain didn’t stop. It pounded against the earth in an endless rhythm, and somehow, in that rhythm, there was a truth. The abyss I was looking down wasn’t just emptiness. It was the thing that made life sharp, the edge that made us feel alive. To know the abyss was to know how fleeting it all was, how precarious, how precious.
She was still here, right next to me. Breathing, alive. But the grief didn’t care about that. This was a lossless grief, a sorrow not from death or absence. She was here, but she wasn’t, and the weight of that pressed down on me like the rain.
It doesn’t rain here much but today rain washed the world clean. It erased everything, the grief, the struggle, the questions without answers. And in that damn stillness there was a kind of peace. Not giving up, not despair. Just a stillness, a recognition of what is.
The cold coffee cup stayed on the table. A reminder of time slipping away, of life moving forward no matter how hard we try to hold on. But something shifted. The balance of it all felt different. Lighter, maybe. Or just changed.
It doesn’t rain here much but today rain kept falling like a soft hymn. And somewhere in its endless cadence, I began to let go. To accept what was. To see that in the face of the bleak, there is a strange kind of grace. The grace of knowing it will end, and loving it anyway. And for now, she was here, breathing in the quiet.
It doesn’t rain here much but today it did. Rains like these the world around takes notice and sighs a collective, “We needed this.”
I stood up. My legs were stiff from sitting too long, knees cracking with the effort. The mug light in my hand, the dregs cold and bitter when I finally drank them.
In the kitchen, the burnt eggs had curled in on themselves, expensive black edges crumbling with the slightest touch. I threw them away without ceremony, rinsing the pan under cold water, watching the steam spiral into nothing.
She made a small sound, like a sigh caught in her nose. I was there before I knew it, kneeling beside her, brushing damp hair from her forehead. Her eyes fluttered open for a moment, glassy and unfocused, but there.
“I’m here,” I whispered, though she probably couldn’t hear me. Or maybe she did. Maybe it didn’t matter.
Outside, the rain had softened to a mist, the world blurry and unsure. But it was still there. I pressed my forehead gently against hers, grounding myself in the warmth of her skin.
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This article was originally contributed to The Memoirist.
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Our Little Kartoffel 
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