It seems to me that I’ve been the witness to more than the average share of death in the last couple of years. Not like I’ve been on the front lines or working in a cancer ward, but it’s been closer than it has been for a while. It could be that it has to do with the fact that I’m at that age when most of the adults I’ve been around all my life are reaching the point of no return.

Today I drove my mom and uncle to West Palm Beach to visit their brother (obviously my other uncle) who has been battling lung cancer for the last three years. His disease has progressed to the point where he is in the final stages, hospitalized and the doctors have only given him “a few hours” to live.

Now here is this guy who was perhaps the most alive person I have ever met in my entire life. And through the haze of drugs and disease the person who he is and was still refuses to die. Still fighting with the doctors and us and against the tide of time and eternity. Even with his eyes unable to resist folding into his brow and the coming misfortune and inevitability of his final curtain, he’s fighting for his life. Not for his time in this place, but for his life. That inner thing that makes him the lovable son of a bitch that he is.

I would have to believe that if your were around this death often, like these folks that work in the hospital and see this passage every day, it might be easy to walk beyond the wonder of the final moments of someone’s life on this earth. Some folks just wouldn’t be cut out for this factory of death.

I’m walking to the twilight
along this starry fold
I’m staring in the river
for my family of souls

and soon I’ll stand among them
their loving hands to hold
the boatman on this river
will finally steer me home

And today the children are flying in from across the country, in flights that cris-cross land masses and defy sanity with zig zag lines of abortive journeys that sputter and leap from time zone to time zone with paper boarding cards and little strips of squiggly lines among the peanut packets and rolling carts and aluminum tubes

To the square sterile walls of the cancer ward. For plans and stories and old times to share and caskets and plots, both adjectives and nouns. And the food. There is always the food. Why do the dead need all this food anyway? How hungry can they be? Hungry for this world. Hungry for the meat of life. Hungry for the grease that folds and hangs on the bone and laughs at another martini. Another disease from the plowman of time and the applause of destiny and inevitability.

But even though the dead surround my world, I can only think about the living. The living I can see and they surround me like an ocean of reality, thick with the swirling bacteria of love and desire and beauty and decay. And through all of the decay, there is a light in this world today that shines into my heart and minds eye and the world lights up around your feet. And I’m not ready for the dance, but I’ll gladly step for you today. Step across the grass pregnant with dew that washes my feet with the tenderness and the love of a new found morning.