Tuesday, September 20, 2016

Beautiful Dying

Excerpt from "Beautiful Dying"

Bars at closing time are a sad place to be, if you happen to still be there. Either a good time is coming to an end too soon or it never came at all. If I thought there was a cry-in-your-beer song on the old Wurlitzer I might have fed my own quarters into the slot. Not because of my good time theory, but because I knew this would be my last Saturday night in Finnegan’s Rock.
And then a small wisp of hope landed in my life.
“I’m sorry about your wife.” She said.
“Thank you.”
“I still don’t understand, you know, the dying beautiful thing.”
I lit another cigarette and offered her one. She declined.
“It’s beautiful dying.” I said. “Not dying beautiful.”
She waited.
How much more did I want to say?
“Dying is something we can’t control. It is going to happen to every one of us, probably when we least expect it. Even when battling a terrible illness, on our backs in a hospital bed, we don’t always believe we are going to die. We hold onto to an unraveling thread of hope, while a caring nurse delivers our nourishment through a feeding tube. That kind of dying is not beautiful, it’s ugly.”
“Are you dying?” She whispered.

“No.” I smiled at her. “I’ve already done that.”

Beautiful Dying available at Amazon

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