Ripped and Rubber Hands

Your face. It used to be flushed and pink. It used to mimic with pure joy. Your cold now - from the rubbery Gray skin on your palms, to the placid blankness in your eyes. Sitting on the edge of this this metal framed bed, I'm watching you as the life is slowly sucked from your heart, until you are just the image of human. A body, with wisps of a heartless soul. Beside you, your IV is beeping, on and on. For every beep another second of your life you live, another moment I can hold your hand. Although it has been weeks since I have seen those Gray blue eyes of majestic fantasy your image has not faded. I will not forget.

*---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------*

I find myself asleep, my head resting on the hard structure of your body beneath the blankets. If you were well, you would have woken me up. We would have laughed together, shared our time. But if you were well, we wouldn't be in this hospital, would we? I wouldn't have fallen asleep on top of you. It wouldn't be this way.

The nurse comes in. Says she needs to check your catheter. Catheter. Those aren't the kind of words you would have spoken. You would say simple things and think simple things - ocean breezes and the smell of babies and kittens and afternoon picnics. Those things would have made you smile.

I know you so well but the nurse...she doesn't care. She shuts the curtains around you with one swoop. The TV outside your bed is playing the afternoon highlights of a golf game. The curtains swim in an afternoon breeze. Your room, it looks out onto the highway. Cars swing by outside the tidy row of palm trees circling the hospital. I wonder if this is how you wanted to die. Lying in a tiny room, outside a highway.

We all think of these spectacular ways to die, to end our time. In the end though, it's not really our choice, is it? It wasn't yours.

The nurse has finished. She draws back the curtains, gives me one short smile. "You can come in now."

Your still the same as you were ten minutes ago and the same as you will be ten minutes in the future.

I stand there and picture you open your eyes. Sit up. Hold my hand. "It's alright," you would say, "It's over now." And I would cry. We would be together again.

Your hands are at your side, rubber from ill use, cracked from chemo. You don't move, not an inch.

This is the end. I put my hand against yours, gently kiss your cold face. Listen as the IV stops in one slow and steady beep.

*--------This is the end--------*