Today is Good Friday.

I have a few minutes to write before returning to Aunt Clara’s bedside.  Yesterday we viewed old photographs together.  She remembered the good times, traveling to new places, the trip to Florida with co-workers, the worn 8×10 photo displaying a smiling group, she in the middle, beautiful and appearing eternally young.  Aunt Clara and her niece spent a pleasant time together revisiting the past, which remains present in memory.

Nevertheless in the background is the pain caused by her sickness.  Cancer, persistent, advancing.  The pain is by difficulty, kept somewhat at bay by morphine.  I cannot imagine the time of our ancestors before the advantage of pain management medication.  Make no mistake while morphine helps a lot, it is no solution to her condition.  She is dying, growing weaker by the hour, and visibly by the day.  And she has dread of the pain.  She has said more than once that she desires to be done with the fight.

I think that I understand as well as I can.  I wish that she could depart now.  That would be merciful, the final act in her life which has been magnificent as far as I am concerned.

Aunt Clara, I bid you farewell.  You will live on in the lives of your son’s family, and in our lives.  We will bless you and Kurt for the memories of what you loved and for your care-taking of your family, your home, the garden, your horses, the land here in Eagle River, and your friends.

To conclude, more lines from T. S. Eliot:

IV

The wounded surgeon plies the steel
That questions the distempered part;
Beneath the bleeding hands we feel
The sharp compassion of the healer’s art
Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.

     Our only health is the disease
If we obey the dying nurse
Whose constant care is not to please
But to remind us of our, and Adam’s curse,
And that, to be restored, our sickness must grow worse.

     The whole earth is our hospital
Endowed by the ruined millionaire,
Wherein, if we do well, we shall
Die of the absolute paternal care
That will not leave us, but prevents us everywhere.

     The chill ascends from feet to knees,
The fever sings in mental wires.
If to be warmed, then I must freeze
And quake in frigid purgatorial fires
Of which the flame is roses, and the smoke is briars.

     The dripping blood our only drink,
The bloody flesh our only food:
In spite of which we like to think
That we are sound, substantial flesh and blood-
Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good.

—excerpt East Coker by T. S. Eliot