One last round with Hilary

Seattle, WA, 14-JUL-2019 – The radar is installed and working, so is the new autohelm.

On the advice of Peter in Port Townsend, I sanded the rudder post on the wind vane autohelm fixing a mating problem that was insurmountable for more than a year. Peter felt a burr that, even after he pointed it out to me, I could not feel.

It is one month before we leave . The windows (technically ‘‘lights’’) are out of Caro Babbo. Templates for the replacement windows are with Charlie, the fabricator.

Today, the inexpensive pop rivet tool, which only needed to last for four rivets, broke in two during the installation of the first rivet.

It has been a typical boat-working process.

In early June, Jennifer and I rented a car and did a three-week loop of the western United States that included five days with Jennifer’s cousins and aunts in Ridgway Colorado as part of memorial for Hilary.

Hilary traveled with me, spoke to me without words and looked over my shoulder at the goings on. I first noticed Hilary was there when I projected a nude photograph of her at age 57 standing in front of body of water. If you looked like that naked at 57, you wouldn’t hide your body either.

I had put together a slide presentation of Hilary for the memorial. It was made of the hundreds of digital photographs I had of Hilary. A few were scanned from paper, the rest were digital of an older Hilary, generally traveling her journey through dementia to death.

I included the picture because the cousins had been visiting a clothing-optional hot spring in the next town over from Ridgway. Stories of naked Hilary adventures, a nude rafting trip and swinging naked on rope tire swing at a public beach, were legend.

When the slide appeared the heat of Hilary’s face leaning over my right shoulder was there. Imperceptible at first, and then undeniable. She made no comment, and seemed to have no feelings other than have been called back.

Hilary’s remaining ashes were in my white canvas travel bag under the black mesh shoe bag that held my passport and electronic traveling gear.

We had planned to give each adult relative some of the crumbled concrete that was said to have been Hilary. We never did.

Hilary would lean over my should when she was the topic of conversation. The heat of her presence rising and falling – at the time I thought I knew when she approved and disapproved, but now I can only say I felt her during those times.

She stood across the room, outside the circle of Jennifer’s cousins as they grilled me, like a well-seasoned steak, on who I was and my beliefs. At times, I felt, because I am a generation older, that my thoughts were evaluated as having value; during that circle of warmth I felt like I was getting to know these women. Hilary who stood thin, naked and pale, as a true shade should, watched the conversation, watched me and made eye contact with me. Someone walked in from outside the house and the moment and the intimacy of the group popped like a soap bubble; the shade lost interest and turned away from me.

Hilary as a center of conversation was as natural as it was when Hilary was alive; in Ridgway I would feel her look over my shoulder. When I spent a day alone cooking dinner for the group, Hilary was not in the house with me. Perhaps she traveled with her blood relatives to Telluride.

Hilary, when she was alive, before she started to slip away on the wind, was, when she was around me, perceptive. Her eyes were not blank, they were seeing. And she talked. It was difficult for me to understand, even at the time, whether she meant the effusive compliments on my talents and conversations, or it was merely a way to not voice an actual opinion yet be active in the time.

As Hilary disappeared, she was oftentimes more intimate with me. touching me and keeping her arm linked in mine. People generally thought we were a dear, very-in-love couple. (A woman told me how wonderful it was to see us together, so in love, I suspect it appeared more carnal than it was. I told the woman it wasn’t what it seemed, Hilary was my mother-in-law. The woman recoiled at the horror of incest. After a couple of beats I explained that Hilary had Alzheimers and a different admiration returned.)

The intimacy of the shade beside and behind me was a different intimacy, a familial intimacy of an opposite sex, close blood relative with whom there is safety.

Hilary’s shade traveled with us to the Phoenix, where Hilary lived with Don, and left me there.

During our travels before arriving at Phoenix we traversed National Parks that Hilary visited. We met a couple who had hopped a ride as crew across the Atlantic from La Rochelle France and were cycling north to Alberta to catch a homeward-bound flight. The woman was now pregnant, starting a life.

In Phoenix, it was the first time I had been to the Hilary Hoffmann house without its living, breathing namesake.

As Hilary’s dementia progressed she became a shade in life; Jennifer and I comment on the difficulty remembering that during the years that Jennifer and I were never more than 90 minutes alone without Hilary, we often don’t see her in our memories of the events.

Hilary doesn’t yet visit me in my dreams but she will. When time enough passes that she and I should have seen each other by now, she will appear to fulfill that timetable. I wonder if she’ll speak or just be present, communicating by her heat next to my face.