As mentioned in my previous post, Reading In Crisis, my husband Mark is in the ICU. He has been in the hospital exactly 25 days now; 19 of them in Intensive Care.

As you can imagine, this has turned almost everything in our lives upside-down. He obviously can not work, our three children (aged six, five and one) miss their daddy terribly, I am not functioning at full capacity because I am unsure of Mark’s health trajectory.

Thankfully, one thing that has remained a strong passion for me is reading. And I hope this means of coping remains a peaceful place for me for as long as my current life situation continues. I can sit for long stretches engrossed in an amazing memoir, a tragic bit of literary fiction, or a page-turning thriller. I can devour hours of well narrated audio-book while wandering the streets or lying on my bed.

One thing I am however struggling to commit myself to, is the reflective writing that, for me, normally comes after the reading. In addition to a creeping apathy that nags at me when I think about writing a voluntary review or musing about the real life comparisons brought to mind through fiction, I am finding that everything I read these days is coloured so heavily by the fact that my husband is critically ill.

Cheating on your spouse? Despicable. Nauseating. Don’t even want to hear about it.  Complaining about your pretty-much perfect life? Idiotic. The stream-of-consciousness of a seven year old girl? Irrelevant. Infuriating even. Of course, this doesn’t stop me from reading. It only stops me from having much to say in the way of intelligent analysis.

What this means, is that I have a whole lot of post ideas piling up on me, and I am hoping that in sporadic bursts they will fly out of my head onto the page. Unfortunately, I know they won’t be coming every day like I managed upon the founding of this site. I will however, be reading every day so there will be no shortage of things to write about in the times when I can bring myself to get them out.

If you are interested in following Mark’s condition or are just curious about what happened to him, you can go to my Caring Bridge blog at www.caringbridge.org/visit/markhollett.