Watching Over Frances

You’re in bed. Asleep. Again.

Deep even breaths. Head on the pink and white striped pillow. Your short, white, damp-looking hair is tousled like a child’s. You are out! I gently touched your left shoulder when I first entered your room, but no response. You are far away in some other space, not interested in the here and now. Even with me come to visit, you’re not coming back just yet. And I don’t take it personally. I don’t try again to rouse you, though I’ve purposely come in the morning this time since my last two visits found you this very same way, deeply asleep. I know this is your process. I know that the ever-increasing sleep pf the dying is part of the journey of leaving.

 So I sit in your wheelchair pulled up close to your bed and I simply look upon you. You are so pale, your brow slightly furrowed as if your dream is something to be figured out, a mystery to be deciphered. Mostly your breaths are quiet and the flowered comforter rises and falls, rises and falls, smoothly and evenly, almost imperceptibly And I recall the phrase “gazing prayer,” which I read in a book several years ago. How apt, I think, as I slowly take in every aspect of your peaceful form, now snoring softly. I notice everything. Each wrinkle and line of the thousands on your face. Each hair in your skimpy eyebrows. Your periwinkle nightgown. Your slightly parted lips.

 Outside these walls an immense loud TV, a radio announcer, an insistently ringing phone, the clatter of dishes as lunch is prepared. But here, at your side, in your room there is a lovely small silence. Around you and from you and in you, stillness. Here all is still (silent) (tranquil) (stopped.) I’m with you in this . So I gaze and I vigil and I love you and I stay.