TGIF

Their long awaited union apparently not meant to be, Venus and Jupiter are going their separate ways. With a nod to propriety, their hookup last Tuesday was cloaked in privacy. Unless Venus starts spinning out baby moons, one might only conjecture what may have happened behind the clouds that drew a curtain across the event. Below, there they are this morning, picture taken from my pillow as I sat up sipping coffee, parting. Venus is the brighter, lower.
  

Reading yesterday morning's MRI, Malinda's neurosurgeon pronounced it perfect, her three brain surgery procedures successful, aneurysms gone and no sign of more, blood flowing correctly through the stents. Her short term memory loss from the mild stroke that happened the evening of the third surgery may or may not fade with time, as well as behavior shifts that I read are normal after the brain is touched by medical procedure. 

What with hurrication and the above, almost no day has a plan any more. If it works out, we mean to drive into Panama City for business, pick up a legal form, get mail from our temporary post office box, stop by 7H to check for any sign of forward movement, may or may not have lunch somewhere to or from. Stop by HNEC for a Sunday bulletin. The back wall on M's old house has been leaning out further and further threatening to collapse, and we may drive by on 9th Street StAndrews to see if Wednesday night's storm finally brought it down. Declared a total loss, the house was paid for by the insurance company, a new home under construction at Breakfast Point, PCB. Last time we stopped by, the kitchen cabinets in crates were stacked in the great room, and were to be installed this week; so for sure, we'll stop by there on the way in or back to admire. That's tentative though, as Malinda's inclinations, determination, willingness, cooperativeness change without hint, and we do not leave her alone.

My blogpost yesterday or the day before said something about oblivion when deeply under anesthetic, that REM sleep does not happen, accordingly, not waking up with memories of having dreamed. In my case at Cleveland Clinic, I did not experience the blackness of it, absolutely no experience of not Being, because basically I Was Not, so therefore not present to experience. At the time, January 2011, I likened what I observed, not to dying, but to the oblivion of death itself; and the difficulty the human mind faces in trying to fathom no experience whatsoever. But it would be like Time before we were born. In that regard, thinking biblically, there is tension between ideas of death as we read Paul (see 1st Thessalonians 4:13-17) speaking of those who are "sleeping in Jesus" (ie, Christians who have died) - - sleeping until the Last Day, and not at all to be facetious, but surely they are not dreaming while thus obliviously dead? (this from Paul, who believed the Last Day was imminent and not billions upon billions of years hence) and what Luke (see Luke 23:43) writes Jesus saying on the cross, "Truly I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise." And more tension between those two scriptural possibilities, and doctrines of other religious groups, or as C S Lewis delights us in The Great Divorce, and a medical science view that when living beings die, all organs, including the brain, cease to function and decompose. All this thought, exploration, contemplation, are not discouraging or faith challenging to me; and in any event I'd rather think about it and discuss it than simply to be told how it is by religious or any other authority who also does not know. 

Yes, I think we are going to have our Friday adventure now, so close.

T