Six-Word Saturday: “Routine Medical Examination, Sit and Wait”

Thank you to Debbie at Travel with Intent for hosting the Six-Word Saturday challenge.

Self is in the closing section of Semezdin Mehmehdinovic’s My Heart, his (really quite lovely) meditation on the frailty of the body, on the melancholy of aging, of saying good-bye.

Awesome Book. Five Stars.

It is a triptych: the first third is about his “first heart attack,” at the age of fifty. The middle section is about a road trip he takes with his detached son. The final section is about the after-effects of his wife’s stroke.

Does it sound depressing to you? It sounded depressing to self. At first, she wasn’t sure she wanted to read it. Perhaps she’d just skim.

She was wrong. If the first third didn’t quite grab her, she was glad she stuck with it. By the end of the father-and-son road trip, she was hooked.

The last section is like a love letter to the narrator’s wife, it so tenderly describes the most devastating after-effect of her stroke: her memory loss.

Holding hands, we step into the circular glass door through which I have often passed over the last months. Our moving shadows break up in the glass. The melancholy of late summer. We go up in the elevator to the fourth floor. We’re in the hospital for a routine medical examination. We sit and wait. In the silence, we look at a painting in front of us by an anonymous artist. And then Sanja asks: “Isn’t it a pitiful destiny for an artist for their works to end up on the wall of a doctor’s waiting room . . . ?”

My Heart, p. 223

It’s a book about grief, but it is not depressing.

Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.