I watched the oldest woman....

posted by jeremy on December 13, 2007

being moved from the retirement complex on Royal st. today.....

She was a 1000 years of age easily.... She lay there looking skywards and I looked skywards with her. The sun was bright, warm.... The sky crystal.... A cool breeze.... Pigeons cooed and shat in the street.... People were laughing, unaware, looking East, not West.....

Tho I watched. I watched.

& I wondered if she was dancing her last hours.....

As I wonder my own inevitable check-out move so often these days....

That moment where you find out what this all might not be.

She was as cracked as car-wreck glass... She was wizened.

She was beautiful. Her mortality took my breath away.

And looking at her, her eyes turned up and all that wasted flesh...

All I could think about was the final loneliness of it.....The tone of that EMS tech as he pushed her gurney into the ambulance.... The implied everyday-ness of her demise....

How it just is going to come down on us all, in all its terrible lonely beauty.

Kill me early, I thought, should I ever forget this.

And kill me even quicker if I fear death oh so much that I dont do what I know needs to be done.... If I ever turn from those things, these things, these cusp that frighten me.

O baby, please kill me dead should I ever turn away.