OXYGEN (Copyright) 12.2.09

Looking at her in the hospital bed, her image from twenty years ago flashed flashed across his mind. Then she was full of life, brimming over with it, but now, seeing her gasp for breath, the oxygen tank always at the ready, she was full of death. It’s not fair he thought, it’s not just but his rational mind knew that life was never impartial. And death was certainly partial, often capricious, even malicious. At the age of 41 cancer had struck her like being hit with a plank of wood, thwack, right across the chops as she said when she first knew.
Her once luxuriant hair now lay sparse, dull and pulled back from her face where new angles had appeared like a landscape as she lost weight. The once rosy cheeks now blotched and red; her sparkling eyes gleaming feverishly like a hunted deer watching the circling predatory wolf that would never let give up the hunt. Her lips were stretched thin and taut as occasionally she babbled o’ green fields, her nose as sharp as a pen. How odd to be thinking of Falstaff. He had been faithful to her, in his fashion. She accepted that. At least she didn’t whisper, I know thee not old man. His heart broke for Falstaff but now it shattered into pieces forever for his beloved Joanie. She lay there immobile. Her last breath has just been taken.