Well they confiscated my 9/10th empty saline spray from my carry-on in the last leg of the return flight from Manila, so I am having to scrounge through the medicine cabinet at home. Found an old prescription allergy pump bottle, gave myself a couple of squeezes. I've been home for about 36 hours—that medication poleaxed me.

I woke up starving and as I'm going downstairs to the kitchen, I realize shit I could talk again without coughing. Even though I shouldn't push my luck, I'm gonna follow this thought verbally cause you know the whole fucky typing thing. Anyway.

Facing the process of letting go. I've talked about this before, how you can know someone for multiple decades and then see them in real time slipping away.

It started with the humming.

Granted, this is not somebody that I've ever really truly had an apology from. Like, hey I hurt your feelings oops sorry. Nah that's a West Coast thing and I'm from New York. Yet we kept on and I went through my worst bits with her. For Chrissake, J was my roomie in college for one semester, prolly got tear-gassed together at least once. She was there when I met my first guy, through the arrivals of all three kids, the foibles of my crazy brothers one of whom she even very briefly dated, the break-up of my parents, then loss of first guy. She actually was dating my second guy, and when she was done with him, there was a cordial handoff.

Those guys are both gone and now she's going too.

Actually, back up a few months. When I announced this current choir tour to the family, as a sidebar I said oh yeah by the way, J has signed up as well so I'll have a built-in roommate instead of the usual carefully curated assignment from Mark. My sister-in-law who has two sisters that drive her crazy, remarks wow I don't know if I would've gone that way. She just invited herself?
I said well yeah sort of; plus we get discounts with more tour members. SIL is like humpf. I dismissed it, but in retrospect, I blew right past my quiet dread.

Back up another decade and a half, and there's an email with large letters and whimsical format of colored fonts, announcing the impending brain surgery J has scheduled. It's a meningioma that apparently can sit there quietly until it either kills you or moves to a spot that's way too vulnerable to ignore like eyesight in this case. So under the knife she goes. Good news it's not cancerous. Bad news is even though it's gone there's a long rehab.

Me and the old man do the requisite visit, have lunch at her place where her sister and BIL are temporarily staying with her post-surgery. My recollection is she seems fine, slowed down, but she's still there. There's gonna be an impact, unspecified, but probably only really obvious as time goes by and the data
emerges.

Before I go on, let's back up a sec to 25 years ago.

My mom and I are in the thick of it. She’s still hiding her drinking and holding court at the local farmers’ market on Sunday mornings, feeling her oats, but I think—man this makes me sad—she's coming to a slow realization that something ain’t right. Her health issues are accumulating like a fucking ball rolling down hill and all the well-meaning medical types just can’t stop
it. So naturally, she gets a little defensive every once in a while. One time though she takes this left turn during a phone conversation and basically—and I swear to God I'm not making this up—she says in this exasperated tone that maybe I could be alittle bit more like my friend, the one who had an affair with my dad. She blurts out she's a better daughter. As convoluted as this sounds, it's based on some carefully curated and weird new age shit, past lives, reincarnation and such. I’ve heard it before, I’m  not buying it, and for her, it’s a pretty sore spot that I was never on that parallel track of spiritual exploration. I said you want a different daughter? Knock yourself out. Hung up the goddam phone.

I was weeping when I tried to vent about this in a phone call the next day with J. She took my mother's side. Not directly, of course; details not important, but essentially you don't honor your parent by gossiping about them was the gist of it. You get over it and move on. That and I knew she had lost her mom unexpectedly a few years earlier.

So here we are in 2026 and I'm in Japan, thousands of miles away from my comfort, my couch and reruns of West Wing, partnered up in hotel rooms with J. Beginning almost immediately she big-sisters me—not new, and still not welcome—in fact she ups the ante to nagging mother: cover your mouth when you cough flush the toilet, I don't ever get to choose which bed this tour is the worst organized it's too cold in here.

Thermostat’s at 72F.

She has conservatively twice the luggage as me and it is spread out over every available surface, including the bathroom where she needs a long hot shower at 5:30 am.

Now we come to the humming. She cannot make it stop. She confesses it’s been going on two years. Imagine a five note leitmotif on an endless loop. Not recognizable at least to me anyway in the sense that if you come from a certain era, you got quite the songbook to choose from: you got Beatles you got Crosby Stills and Nash you got Joni Mitchell and Judy Collins and Joan Baez and Bob Dylan. I mean you got a lot to choose from; personally, I could go back as far as Neil Sedaka. Even three notes can be a respectable Riff. Beethoven or Mozart, I'm thinking the beginning of the overture to the Marriage of Figaro.

But it's not any of that. Unh-uh, no joy. Just five repeating notes. I have hearing aids that can stream a podcast directly from a device, yet it somehow bleeds through. The size of an average hotel room is of no consequence, and I can't hide in the bathroom. Imagine no warning no start no stop no typical duration simply omnipresent. Like water torture. The days go by quite nicely; we’re not joined at the hip after all. But then the evenings and the off-times at the hotels. The dreaded itinerary discussions/complaints/humming. Two weeks.

Then J is on her way back to the States, still happily hitting reply-all to private WhatsApp tour messages.

Our choir splinter-group is off to the Philippines for a week of visiting remote charitible organizations to sing and commune, give them our donations. The tiny children before us gently take your hand and press it to their foreheads. The adults show us the horrific damage from the recent hurricane. The weather is low 80’s in contrast to Japan’s 40’s & 50’s.

***

Sunday has come around once again; here I am, feeling much better, damn cough almost gone, weather splendid, sitting outside  at a café with my Knitting buddies. We are an ancient verbal lot   and we all sit relatively politely as we knit, listening to one another’s fantasies being spun from recent and distant memories. And as I give a short version of the Hum Incident, Cindy gives a big sigh. Oh god, she says, I remember a tour with nine other folks, and it only took three days until none of us was speaking to the other.
I laugh.

And I bite my tongue to keep from crying.