Unanswerable Questions

As I walked across the room toward him, I wasn't sure he was still living. His eyes were heavy-lidded, his mouth drooped open, his chest neither rising nor falling. He made no sound. He looked a bit out of place in his own home: a hospital bed in his otherwise simply elegant bedroom, a female nude done with pastels an odd counterpoint to the near lifeless body nearby. I approached him, spoke to him introducing myself, and for a few agonizing moments there was no response. Then suddenly, surprisingly, his respirations sputtered to start, like a car engine on a very cold morning. He was still living, reluctantly.

I had more questions than he would have answers. I had arrived during his last hours, maybe his last minutes. What had all the rest of his life been like? It wasn't even like seeing the tip of the iceberg! More like one ice crystal of it.

Yet there was, as always, a sacred silence in the portent of that moment, a thickness in the air that held his labored breathing in colloidial suspension. This was not a time for coming to know more, but one for living with unknowing on the threshold of the unknown. I thanked him for his hospitality, for sharing this private, precious, tenuous time with me.

The dying often have unintentioned capacities. Their virtues are constantly being discovered.