How it would feel to lie in your death bed, to know that you would die there.

Alternately hot and cold, perhaps, or maybe just cold. Delirious or just bored witless, the sheets at times comforting and at times rough and painful, wrapped around ankle and wrist like restraints. The sheets which begin the day clean but, by midnight's restless watch, have adopted your stench: The stench of you, but gone bad. The smell of your self rotting away - dusty and dry, or medicinal with the tang of urine, or musky and rich like fresh earthworms -

and the time, all the time in the world to think these thoughts, as your body fails.

How it must feel to wait through the night, moonlit, cold and barren. Afternoon visits by sullen, frightened children and falsely cheerful youngadults with no knowledge, no concept of death at all. How you grow to resent them, as much as you need them. How their eyes glance sharply off your glazed stare, not wanting to see your muddy, blurred searching of their physiognomy.

Searching the faces of your loved ones, of those progeny in whom you have placed all your trust and all your doubt for the future. Searching for a sign, a marker, a glint of something solid. Knowing that you have no choice in the matter: suddenly this is the future, this gaggle of people you love frantically but have barely connected with.

The utter helplessness of being ill, the regret. The thought of all those days when the spring boughs were waving and the ice cream trucks tinkling and you, you were wrapped up in your self
(whom you are now unable to escape, ever, for ever)

Perhaps the thought of all the time that is gone away, what could have happened.
Perhaps a name that sticks like popcorn in the back of your throat, and you spend the better part of a day trying to remember

before giving up
(the ghost) of someone, long gone now and anyway it doesn't matter.

The realization that it really doesn't, doesn't matter. That you have done what you will do in your life, there is no more need to worry. For better or for worse, that things are finally out of your hands

and you can relax
and die in this bed with a needle in your arm, a nurse who knows all the embarrassing secrets, the television blaring
and the sheets wrapped all around