Thoughts...in the key of me.

I'm sitting here in Tampa General Hospital watching my Popi die. It's a strange thing, really. I know it's been said countless times that life is one big cycle...but it is so much more evident when you witness its completion. When we are born, we crawl around in diapers. We are not able to function totally on our own. We are dependant on others to feed us and dress us. Likewise, before we die, we lie there in diapers. We are dependant on an IV drip to give us nourishment. Others have to take care of us and make us comfortable. Life really is a cycle. It's fascinating how the joining of the two sides of life takes place. Birth is a stressful event with pushing, squeezing, pulling, and finally that gasp of air to initiate us into life. Death completes the cycle with blood straining to push through the veins...squeezing every ounce of energy from the body into the effort to live...pulling nutrients from the IV and from elsewhere...and finally that gasp of air to put the period at the end of the novel of life.

I hate to quote a song at a time like this...I wish I could come up with my own words. Perhaps I will soon. In the meantime, this song won't leave my head.

And it came to me then that every plan
Is a tiny prayer to father time
As I stared at my shoes in the ICU
That reeked of piss and 409
And I rationed my breaths as I said to myself
That I’d already taken too much today
As each descending peak on the LCD
Took you a little farther away from me
Away from me

Amongst the vending machines and year-old magazines
In a place where we only say goodbye
It stung like a violent wind that our memories depend
On a faulty camera in our minds
And I knew that you were a truth I would rather lose
Than to have never lain beside at all
And I looked around at all the eyes on the ground
As the TV entertained itself

‘Cause there’s no comfort in the waiting room
Just nervous pacers bracing for bad news
And then the nurse comes ‘round and everyone lifts their heads
But I’m thinking of what Sara said
That love is watching someone die...

So who’s gonna watch you die?