[thenightwriterblog] The Night Writer: Just waiting: January 24, 1997

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Posted by The Night Writer:
Just waiting: January 24, 1997
http://thenightwriterblog.powerblogs.com/posts/1169591749.shtml


   At the end we were just waiting for the practiced heart, which had
   betrayed him years before and now seemed to want to make amends, to
   finally lie back and take its rest.
   Halfway across the country I listened and could still sense the beat.
   I also listened through the phone lines as his children gathered and
   told me of each regression that certainly had to be the last but
   wasnât; his life force stretched as implausibly thin yet as
   miraculously effective as the fiberoptics that carried me into that
   room as they described sound and color.
   Scarcely a week since I had been there to see for myself: told to
   hurry, and arriving to clasp the withered hand, to see the chalky
   color, to hear the faint voice, to kiss the papery skin, and to
   smell...to smell the rubber and the medicine and the institutional
   disinfectant...and that one scent that they seemed to want to cover up
   but I could still detect in the back of my throat as I stood at the
   bedside.
   Just waiting, back at home, I stood by another bedside, listening to
   my wife breathe. Undressing, I fit myself in beside her, our heads
   touching, our arms around each other, and we talked about the great
   moments of oneâs life -- the excitement before a birthday, the joy
   before a wedding -- and how those fall short of the momentous
   anticipation and anxiety of the days leading up to the birth of a
   child, of going to bed wondering if this will be the night that
   everything will change and we awaken to bring forth a new life, at
   once shuddering in both the hope and the dread of the joy that would
   be set before us and the trial to be endured. We spoke also of the
   hope we have in Christ, and of the days leading up to the joy/dread in
   some distant but nearing future when we go to bed wondering if that
   will be the night that everything will change and we awaken into new
   life.
   I traced the warm, round firmness of her hip with my hand and sniffed
   as her hair brushed under my nose, her skin smooth and her lips soft.
   Still touching, we lay in our temporary cocoon and I remembered that
   some song describes time as a willow tree, bending over to reach the
   water, but I knew that the songwriter was wrong. We are the willows,
   and Time is the river, and we bend and it just goes on, but in that
   moment we laughed and I said âNaked I came into this bed, and naked
   shall I go out!â
   And from down the hallway came the sound of the telephone. Ringing.