Signs & Omens

In the cool warmth of our sunlit room, my wife and I napped. Actually, she napped, I couldn’t sleep. Outside, the day was drawing to its denouement, but my mind would not rest. Her left arm was near me, and I had placed my cheek there against her upper arm while holding her hand. She breathed softly as she melted into the quiet peace of the late afternoon. I had resolved not to think of anything but the hushed dark of sleep, even so, my thoughts wandered to the deep things. I considered how the day would come when I would no longer be able to do such a simple thing as lie in bed with my wife and feel the peace and comfort of her presence.
I did not think how that day was coming – only that it would come.

Have you ever considered how the moment we’re born we begin to progress upon two paths? We begin to live while simultaneously starting the dying process. I am, and you are too – born to briefly mark an obscure sentence in a short paragraph on one page in the long history of the world. The page is turned – sometimes the page is turned when we’re ready – sometimes not.

My father is living through such things. My mother is entering into the deep-dark of Alzheimer’s. What must it be like to watch the person you have loved for 61 years have her personality – her very essence and understanding of the life she has lived with you – slowly erased? It must be terrifying. It must be a constant reminder of just how fragile and unfair life can so often be.

But that day, in the afternoon sunlight, as I stared at my wife, and then to the wall beyond her to see the leaves dancing in the thin shadows of the sun’s dying light, I knew instinctively that this was a time to treasure – a time to let sink deep into the best part of my memory.

Resting there on her arm, I could see the day when one of us would be gone. When there would be no more times to rest together. I could see the night when all that is left is memories, and the shadows having their way on the walls will be nothing more than the half-moon reflecting branches gone dead for the winter.