In this episode, Tom and Tim discuss, in depth, caring for elderly men whose purpose and faculties have essentially left them. What are we learning as caregivers in this experience? What materiality are we feeding? What purpose is there to this ritual and situation? Welcome listeners! - For fascinating stories and insights about serving the end of life.
TIMESTAMPS for you all
00:45 Two eventful weeks
1:00 What are we talking about
2:00 Tom’s mother in law passing, tom taking care of father in law
5:50 Tom on Team Guy dying on the beach.
6:45 Tim about living with and taking care of an old man for a year when he was 23.
8:50 Old man burning money in a tin can
9:30 Accidents and body fluids, learning to make eggs
12:30 inspired to leave home and write about the civil war
13:00 Tim, the old man and Travis Bickle
16:30 If I had met him 10 or 15 years prior
17:45 what this guy noticed about women at his age
18:45 Why Tim dropped out of college
22:00 Go get me 5 notebooks
22:40: Lava lamps, driving out west, How do we handle our elders?
25:30 People we went to school with who have already died
28:00 M&Ms up our nose, etc., shared childhood memories
29:45 Weird materiality of our memories. Less material when one who shared experiences is gone. Solidity of shared experiences.
32:45 Tim’s friend Phil, losing and keeping connections. One side to the story when someone passes, only one version now.
36:00 Rent a car and drive out west reprise. Drag me out in the woods
38:00 Respect, rites, sanctity and Antigone, etc.
39:15 Death is a heavy thing, you better turn it into something
40:00 The Torah, and purity and impurity about how close to the veil something is. Powerful, uncanny, body things, we surround with rules and rites.
43:00 Seeing it at close range, the sublime and the silly.
43:45 The poem about the first time they met.
45:30 Making meaning of the loss
47:00 Signing off. How do we make things better?
47:30 Four stages of life in Hinduism
48:15 Joseph Campbell - The Grand Egress
49:30 Tim and Tom in the Miyazaki village council
50:00 Do you believe the Grand Egress thing?
52:10 Gurdjieff and materiality
53:00 the way things matter when our conscious mind might resist. (Going over there every day making sandwiches
54:07 Ken Burns documentary about Frank Lloyd Wright and the death of his 5’ 7” body
56:30 Tom’s Reading Corner. Endgame by Samuel Beckett. This goes on WAY TOO LONG (30 minutes!), I would recommend skimming through it, or skipping it all together.
