IS IT TOO LATE?

Ba-dump, Ba-dump, Ba-dump, is all I can hear, but not all I can feel. I can feel the soft pressure of the mattress pushing against my back, and gentle caress of the blanket on my legs and chest. I can feel the warmth of my daughter Becky’s hand wrapped around mine, and the rhythmic throbbing of my beating heart. I can feel the pillowy peck of my granddaughter’s lips on my forehead. My sweet, sweet, Emma girl. And I can still feel the dampness of Virginia’s tears on my cheek.

Although it’s been quite some time since my body last purged itself, of the contents of my bowels, I can still feel the greasy remnants between my cheeks. Why must I suffer such indignity? For how long, must I endure this shame. How much of my demise must my sweet Virginia witness? And why, oh why, couldn’t she have gone first?

I can’t hear her or see the expression on her face, but I know exactly what I’m missing. After a lifetime of leaning on me when times were tough, counting on me in times of need, and taking comfort behind me in times of fear, she’ll soon be forced to face it all alone. And she’ll be forced to do it in her weakest, most vulnerable state. If my stomach could still turn, it would do so at the thought of my vibrant wife becoming just another old widow living in her kid’s converted garage. Or worse, a sickly old lady dreaming of yesteryear while staring out the window of some smelly nursing home. She deserves better.

The feeling of failure is hard to suppress as I lie here waiting for the end. Waiting to leave her behind and erase the products of my sixty-eight-year devotion to her joy and comfort. Waiting to be ripped away from Becky, leaving her and Emma in the hands of her man-child husband. I can only hope that my advice will someday sink in, and he’ll finally get a grip on what it means to be a real man.

Dean has never been a man. He’s never served the country, protected the innocent, saved a child from a burning building, or even mowed his own grass. Sure, he’s a good provider in the financial sense, but he leaves the duties of a protector to Becky. I like Dean, but I sometimes wonder if he would put Emma between his laptop and an armed gunman. I wonder if he would offer her as collateral to the bank if they threatened to repossess his precious BMW. But what can I do about it now? What can I do but lie here and pray that he’ll be half the husband his father was. Good old Charlie, the best bunk-mate any grunt could ask for.

I wish I’d told him how much he meant to me, how I always saw him as the brother I never had. I wish I’d found a way to repay him for dragging me out of that trench in Korea when the frostbite was devouring my toes. I’d have lost them all and surely been killed by the wave of enemy soldiers who torched it ten minutes later. As strong as he was, he was no match for Agent Orange.

You were there, weren’t you? When that canister popped. It was you who kept that stuff from soaking into my lungs wasn’t it?

How else can I explain why It did so much damage to Charlie but none to me?

Come to think of it, you were there that night in Ohio too, weren’t you? It was you who pushed that tractor trailer away from us, wasn’t it? I always said that I would go to my grave arguing that divine intervention was the only explanation for how it missed us by only a few inches but slammed into every other car in the lane. And here I am, thirty years later, still giving you the credit.

I can’t confirm this, but I’ve always felt like you had a hand in everything that happened at Packard too. And how my life unfolded after they shut down the plant and left Detroit. How I just happened to find the perfect replacement job, which led us to the perfect state, where we somehow stumbled across the perfect house. And how Virginia wasn’t able to conceive until our finances were perfectly ready to have and raise a child on only one income. Not to mention how our perfect little baby girl has grown up to be a perfect wife and mother.

It could only have been you who put my prostate cancer in remission, just long enough for me to see my granddaughter being born, and to pay off the extra life insurance policy that should, hopefully, allow Virginia to live the remainder of her life in comfort.

I don’t know what I did to deserve such favor but . . .

Ba-dump, Ba-dump, Ba-dump.

There it is again, the only sound that I can hear. The sound of my mortality slipping away as I lay on my death bed asking the very same question I did in the beginning, who are you?

Somehow, at this moment, I remember asking this while I was in my mother’s womb, when I first felt your presence. I also asked it during my unconscious bout with Encephalitis, just before my miraculous awakening and recovery.

In hindsight I wish I’d spent more time getting to know you but after walking this earth for eighty-seven years, I’ve learned quite a bit about you. I’ve learned what you have done in the past, I’ve seen what you did over the course of my existence, and I’ve learned what you’re capable of.

I’ve met countless people who love you unconditionally, and some who only love you when it’s convenient. I’ve met people who fear you as much as they love you, and many who dismiss you as superstition.

I’ve witnessed the hate fueled vitriol of people who curse your name while simultaneously denying your existence. And some who do so, while claiming to love you.

And I’ve heard the countless names that people have given you, rather than the one you’ve offered.

I’ve done my best to live a life full of achievement and moments to be proud of, sometimes failing and sometimes simply giving up. I’ve remembered your words and striven to acquiesce to your edicts. Yet here I lay, in the emptiness of unconsciousness, alone, cold, and asking, “are you real?”

The bible says that when the faithful die, you come to receive them personally and escort them to your kingdom. Is that what I see in the distance? Are you the bright light that seems to be coming toward me? Or is it something sinister to prove me wrong. Something to prove that I didn’t follow the rules and failed to be who I should have been.

In the end, Charlie smiled at death because, as he always said, he knew where he was going. I wish I knew how he knew that. I wish I’d read the same book he read. And I wish I’d tried harder.

Ba-dump . . . . . Ba-dump . . . . Ba . . . dump . . . . . Ba