This winter I met a dying man. He had the eyes of a gentle imp, lit with delight in living a life well examined. His bones were but bonfires blazing orange against the abyss, the ticking of his venerable heart measured hours melting to nothingness, and time was useless in the face of his last appointment. He spoke as if he knew all of this. I knew from my friend, his son, that he did not. At least officially. Though he hinted. He reckoned and I rested caught in a rain of words rolling from clouds that parted in stutters and starts as he spoke in tracks and in trains, relentless stories needing to be told. He shaped and unshaped who he was and had been, an anecdotal sculptor restlessly forming meaning from clay long fired and kiln set.
He spoke of his son. “I lucked out with him”, he said. “I didn’t tell him that of course”. “Why not?”, I wondered in silence. Why wouldn’t he? “I don’t think that I’m as smart as he is”, he said. “He makes the best of everything”.
The tales he told were fabulous. Whether or not his stories were fascinating themselves I can’t know for, the glee in which he traveled crenulated folds of mind was enough to enrapture a moment of mine.
“If I go to YOUR god today, I’m a happy man. I have no regrets and I’ve never hurt anybody. Then again, we don’t always know when we’ve hurt somebody.”
Human, he must have hurt others. I can’t imagine it but I know it to be so. How wonderful though to hold hurting others as the thing that one would regret and how wonderful to die with no regrets. Having lived.
