the ceiling

in august she started limping.
in october she had bone cancer.
in february she was dead.

i held her under the trees when she died. i didn't want the last thing she saw to be the ceiling of the examination room, the last smell she smelled the scent of iodine and sterile gauze in jars, the last sound she heard the voices of the other patients, some in obvious distress.

the last touch the cold of the metal table.

i had worked in a hospital once, and i had had many patients die like this. never was i in the room when they would die, but this only served to make their deaths seem the more lonely. i would remember what i had seen in their charts, what had been reported to me by the staff, and what i had gleaned by conversing with the patients. one man had lived his entire life on a farm before he was admitted to the hospital. he held on for a long time, the fungal infection in his lungs progressing to its inevitable end, the patient wheezing with more and more discomfort until he perished alone in a hospital room.

the last thing he saw was white.

i still feel sometimes like i can see him working on his farm in his coveralls, that i could pinpoint the very moment when the single spore invaded his lungs and overwhelmed his compromised immune system. i always picture him holding a bucket in front of a chicken house, face unshaven and grimy, head covered with a greasy cap, inhaling deeply the fresh air of the countryside, and being thankful that he has received so much. as he does so, he is unaware that a small microscopic particle comes in through his nose, flutters drily through his trachea, and lodges haplessly to the side of a mucous-slathered bronchial tube. from there it spreads deeply into his lungs.

the man wants to live. he is unaware even that the fungus has invaded, much less that it is terminal, much less that he will soon be dead. terminated. by a spore.

and my girl of cancer.

they had to amputate her leg. it was terminal, but they amputated her leg to treat the pain. she seemed as one of the saints those several months as she lived and i gave thanks, and in february i held her under the trees and she was gone. like the man, she too was caught unawares and knew not that it was her last chance to see the sun and breathe the warm, fresh air. she was gone. i lost something that day that will never return. i will always miss her.