I’m probably going to get some of this wrong, but I was in pain and just a little high on hospital drugs when they brought me back from the recovery room after my kidney-stone operation. I saw that I had a roommate, an old man flat on his back with tubes running in and out. He didn’t look like anyone I would want to know.
I didn’t break my neck, but I didn’t make it to the bathroom either. Not that it would have done me any good. By the time the nurses had me safely on my back again, I’d got the message. No matter what I thought my body wanted, it wasn’t going to be able to do it for more long hours than I cared to think about.
I was impressed. I’ll take 85, I thought. I’ll take 16 more years.
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I watched the Bulls win. I listened to my roommate use the phone. By now I knew that he was a widower, but he had someone on the other end of the line he spoke to in familiar tones. His daughter, I thought. He’d mentioned a daughter. An 85-year-old man could have a daughter darn near as old as me.
I could see the Ravenswood el from my window. I could sense the lake beyond. I could imagine the thousands and thousands of living souls out there, some peacefully asleep, others confidently going about their business. I began thinking about the dead, my dead–my mother, my father, my sister, my first wife, her parents, my brother-in-law and his brothers, all those friends, relatives, and fellow workers from the distant and not-so-distant past. Would I see them again, or would I merely join them?
Suddenly it was gray dawn and my doctor was over the bed. He was a young man, younger than my sons. It’s almost frightening to think I trusted someone so young to stick something he called a telescope up the smallest opening in my body, then attempt to extract a stone with something he called a basket.
