No Great Mystery

Today’s prompt: “Write about a vivid but troubled figure from literature as if he or she were your grandparent or great-grandparent. Look for the ways their lives reveal the patterns of codependency, addiction, avoidance, or whatever else you’re dealing with in your own family.”

“There’s no great mystery as to what’s going on here, Watson,” Sherlock says. “This entire family is just very fucked up as to how to deal with illness. And while that’s something that’s going on in many families right now, not to mention the country writ large, as we all deal with coronavirus and our various levels of comfort or discomfort with risk, that’s also something that’s been going on in this particular family for ages. No less than two aunts have kept illnesses secret from their families until they could no longer do so – in one case, until she died in the hospital. And the pattern continues today with this particular yahoo,” Sherlock says, rapping your mattress with the back of his hand. “Once again, they avoided medical care, eschewed doctors, and when they were diagnosed, they kept their loved ones in the dark. How their loved ones failed to notice the telltale signs of an advanced sarcoma – the change in their style of dress to disguise lumps and swelling, for instance, and their movements over the past several months that indicated not the advance of age but an attempt to hide pain – is the greater mystery, not the cause of their impending death. But this supposedly sudden disease is no mystery at all. It wasn’t sudden. It was well-known, well in advance, by one person who absolutely refused to do anything about it for fear of worrying their family.”

You attempt to say something through your breathing tube.

“Shhhh,” Sherlock says. “I’m talking.”