There's an episode of House that ends with a nurse sponging off an expired patient's face carefully - his face looks so soft, smooth and relaxed. She carefully lifts his hands from the blanket it looks as if he was grasping when he expired, she turns his palms facing down and lifts the covers up over his head.
I wonder if that's how it was with my Dad when he died. Mom said he slipped easily once they weren't pumping his lungs to keep them from filling up but it's hard to imagine he was very comfortable. All these years later I don't know that I ever really wanted to be there in the moment but tonight I just wondered about the moments immediately after - that look of calm, that surrender, that serenity. It's an entirely different moment then walking past his bedroom in the middle of the day and stopping with your heart in your throat as you search his body for signs of breathing. Funny they probably look similar but infinitely more comforting, even all these years later, to think of him the final way when the sheet is pulled up and his hands don't look as though they might have been grasping the blanket.
I don't know if we get more then one life but if we do I hope we get a chance to be friends someday. Friends enjoying a few easy summer days at the swimming hole cool from the water drying in the warm sun as we eat sandwiches with smashed up corn chips in them, elbows resting on a worn wooden picnic table. Cool skin, relaxed faces, warm hearts.
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