A Good Run

The words are a gut punch, sucking the air out of my lungs and slamming against my carefully constructed wall of denial until it crumbles. Once again, I feel the now familiar weight of rage and impotence as yet another friend is dying right before my eyes and there's nothing to be done about it. The cancer has taken everything save the faint sparkle in his eyes.

“It's been a good run,” he tells me, his voice weak and wasted, “A little short, but good.”

I force some imitation of a smile and try not to give in to the tears that I feel welling up. What do you say to someone facing their own death? And, I wonder, who comforts who. I find myself desperately wishing I could talk to my daddy one more time. I have an unreasonable idea that he might know the words I'm looking for.

My friend, Charli, brings a tray of homemade soup and tacos and sets it down on the tv tray in front of him, tucks a napkin under his chin and puts a spoon his hand. The oxygen machine purrs quietly and the hospice nurse putters about, checking the morphine solution and counting out pills.

“Eat,” she says firmly, “It'll grow hair on your chest.”

This earns her a small but shaky smile.

Charli and I make useless, chattery small talk, hoping to draw him in to the conversation but I suspect we're both remembering this same kind of day when our dear friend, Blue, was in the same place and we did much the same thing. Even the hospice nurse is the same. Blue was on borrowed time as Bill is now and the reality of it is emotionally and physically numbing. I can't make sense of it, can't begin to conceive of living in this kind of dark place for whatever time remains. Somehow, in some way I don't understand, the dying find a kind of bravery and grace that I've only read about in books. It's up to us to witness and remember.