Curiosity ~ Lucidity ~ Humanity
The night before, he had a dream — at least, he thought it was a dream — where he crawled on all fours down to the end of his hospital bed, himself as he was now, an old man, gray and wasted in a sweat-soaked johnnie, but also a child, not himself as a child, but like a child in a beautifully illustrated children’s book, a Maurice Sendak say, a child in a long white nightgown and trailing nightcap, and he grasped the chipped, white enamel bedrails, and the bed rose at his touch, and he steered it up out of the hospital window into the night, up through the low-lying clouds into the dark where high up the moon was full and golden, and the stars sparked, and he was for a moment exultant, all alone, completely happy, without fear or desire or the burden of his self in this life, happy as a fat, yellow pear suspended at the end of a drooping branch, balanced, magnanimous, loving himself at last and loving everyone else with no separation, content for that instant, and then the bed began to spiral back down through the darkness and the low clouds, and drifted back in through the window, back to its place in the hospital room where the nurse, a lean, muscular, young Irishman with a brogue, asked how he was doing and lifted him up, apparently with only one hand under the small of his back, and bearing him up, stripped the wet sheets and soaked johnnie and exchanged them for clean, dry ones, and raised the head of the bed, and plumped the pillow, and asked again how he was feeling and was he comfortable, and he, old and frail, so much wanted to thank the young man, but the words would not get formed by his somehow thickened tongue and blundering lips, so that at last he gave up and tried with his eyes to thank the young man until, satisfied that he was understood, he lay back on the pillow and drifted into the memory that came to him then from a favorite Shakespeare sonnet, Poor soul, the center of my sinful earth, the poem about the body’s decline and the soul’s ascent, the one that ends so pleasingly, as he would come to realize the next night…and death once dead, there’s no more dying then.