BusterStronghart@Gmail.com

On the illness of two lifelong pals:

This should be really tough; but it isn't. I'm no callous youth, understand please that even as a child I knew, I expected, that Mr. Death would come for me and my friends sooner or later. As we grew older, we each made our bets and beds, now we prepare to count our winnings, balance our losses, and lie in our graves. Some closer to the mud than others, I guess.

I can still hear the dirt raining down my grandfather's coffin, and my Dad's, It's a common sound no matter who we are.. Last year we read Everyman, and that was a peek further down the road than most of us had seen before. Now we drink the Grapes of Roth.

My father didn't want to go, my mother did. She had a sense of humor about it, he didn't.

They both went in their time, but it wasn't the time of their choice. Mother insisted on being taken as soon as Dad was gone, but Dad was hanging on like a boxer on the ropes--he wouldn't go down. He rallied, slowed, and rallied again during an everlasting period of a year. Dad, as I knew him, was a quiet man, easy going in most things, but not this. He was always strong, and in his final illness even stronger. There was a rope holding him up, and some iron force in him fought back, he pushed Mr. Death away, tore the mask from Death, looked at it, stared it in the eye sockets, and Dad simply chose not to go.

He wasn't ready.

But defeat came and after it my mother was immediately ready; and she was upset that God, or Mr. Death had passed her by so many times. There was one time when I looked out her hospital window and saw a figure wearing a cape and a slouch hat astride a black horse trotting down Federal highway.

Mother tried to look down and see it, but her macular degeneration had gone too far; she asked me to open the window and let him know she was here -- and impatient -- ready. She brushed her hair and asked the attendant to put her make up on. She would be presentable on her dark journey. But Death didn't take her that day. He made her wait another two years and she was bitter, angry at God, for forgetting her and taking her lover and leaving her behind. She had no purpose now, she had seen her husband through his times, but now, she thought, she should leave this life, and go on to the next --or to nothing-- as the case might be.

She was ready.


mek