by the Night Writer
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 wasn’t; 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 one’s 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 “Naked I came into this bed, and naked shall I go out!”

And from down the hallway came the sound of the telephone. Ringing.

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