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Edited on Sun Nov-21-04 07:36 PM by LeftPeopleFinishFirs
I had to cut it down to 500 words, so here goes:
It was ten that night, and the disgustingly worn, brownish mauve, faux leather chair I was stuck to gave me no comfort as I sat by myself. A heart monitor bleeped loudly in the room down the hall from where I was sitting, but my mind was miles away. Eerily jubilant landscape paintings confronted me from all sections of the hallway, but they only accentuated the uncomfortable silence of the setting. However bland, I knew every brushstroke in those Kinkade-esque paintings. After all, this whitewashed building had become somewhat of a fixture in my life for the past four months.
My cousin alerted me from my withdrawn state, and I promptly gathered my coat and purse as we headed back into the world of color. Though he was fifteen, sloppy, and (in the opinion of an older cousin) decidedly immature; the eyes that stared down at me were those of someone in midlife. He was someone who had worked hard to keep things as they were, but all the while knowing he would lose them anyway. His eyes were melancholy and blue, with a hint of exhaustion. I knew this night would be the same as any other. We’d go back to his house and sit around lethargically listening to New Found Glory in his rec room, wondering when our mothers would finish talking. We never conversed about death, about what was inevitably going to happen. Driving home at 12, I always found it in myself to finish my schoolwork that night, getting up at 6:30 the next morning to do everything all over again.
The day after one of these nights, I had left my hospital issued chair in the hallway so that I could situate myself in another chair in the room down the hall. This time the chair was puke green, and of the material that is used in standard army cots. I think the chair was mocking my mood, because at three on a Monday afternoon, straight out of a long day at school, the hospital wasn’t a place that I’d have chosen to be. My soccer cleats hung in my gym locker back at the school, waiting for the day when I’d actually be able to make it to practice.
“That’s a great sweater you’ve got there, Margaret”, an ailing voice called out from the aluminum bed, “One of those that you will keep your whole life. And it looks so warm.”
My uncle always said things like that. Though barely recognizable to his family with his gaunt cheeks and bruised body, I think what kept him strong and ready to embrace death in his final days was his wisdom and humor. Even while getting his catheter bag changed, he charmed the nurses by asking what the “daily special” was. That afternoon, we had a seemingly nonchalant conversation about anything and everything. He himself had been anything and everything; he’d been an island ranger on Lake George, a father, a cancer survivor, an Air Force pilot, a husband twice over, a university student at Syracuse, and a high school social studies teacher. Every so often, a beep would emit from the IV machine, and his breathing would slow down. He’d drifted into sleep on and off, finally settling around 9. The next day, I wanted to come back and write his story down on paper. I never got the chance to. The next night, he died.
Being out there in the hallway had made my imagination susceptible to manipulation by the solitude of the faux chair. Being with a dying thin man and actually talking to him gave me a new perspective on everything. Being with my uncle, I realized there was nothing cliché about loss. In life, Uncle Jack’s sailboat was called Serenity. Just as Serenity maneuvered through the most oppressive waters, he calmly floated on. A year later, I went back out on the lake to spread his ashes and lay down pine branches for him. They too, floated out and away on the water.
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