They told me you've lost ten pounds since Monday. It is Friday. You are asleep in your chair.
I am tempted to walk around you, inspecting, to see where the weight came from. You are already so small, smaller than I am, shrinking back down and in after eighty years of growing strong and hard and forward. You are so small we could lose you in the looseness of a size eight blouse that you still insist on wearing. You loved it, you say, for its color, like sunlight through the stain-glass of cathedral windows, coloring the pews we sat on every summer Sunday. I was six; you kept toys for me in your purse, and made me fold my hands each time we prayed. Sweetheart, you said, always make time to pray--for yourself and for God, and for me. You used to sit, silent, for hours at a time to pray. You would curl your hands around each other, your head bent low over them, catching the wordless whispers in the unseen softness of your palms.
Your fingers can't bend like that anymore. The chemicals they have filled you with--ten years' worth of man-made solutions, each one promising salvation, each bringing more sickness, more weakness, and a hint of the promised healing from the death clustering seething breeding inside you--those chemicals have stolen that from you. They have robbed the feeling from your fingers, stiffened neck like iron hands wrapped around it, snatched the breath from you lungs and every hair from your head.
You have lost ten pounds since last Monday. You are asleep in your chair. It is now five o'clock Friday evening. It is nearly ten years since they found the first lump. I have not prayed in three years. I have not slept in three days.
I am scared.
I am tempted to walk around you, inspecting, to see where the weight came from. You are already so small, smaller than I am, shrinking back down and in after eighty years of growing strong and hard and forward. You are so small we could lose you in the looseness of a size eight blouse that you still insist on wearing. You loved it, you say, for its color, like sunlight through the stain-glass of cathedral windows, coloring the pews we sat on every summer Sunday. I was six; you kept toys for me in your purse, and made me fold my hands each time we prayed. Sweetheart, you said, always make time to pray--for yourself and for God, and for me. You used to sit, silent, for hours at a time to pray. You would curl your hands around each other, your head bent low over them, catching the wordless whispers in the unseen softness of your palms.
Your fingers can't bend like that anymore. The chemicals they have filled you with--ten years' worth of man-made solutions, each one promising salvation, each bringing more sickness, more weakness, and a hint of the promised healing from the death clustering seething breeding inside you--those chemicals have stolen that from you. They have robbed the feeling from your fingers, stiffened neck like iron hands wrapped around it, snatched the breath from you lungs and every hair from your head.
You have lost ten pounds since last Monday. You are asleep in your chair. It is now five o'clock Friday evening. It is nearly ten years since they found the first lump. I have not prayed in three years. I have not slept in three days.
I am scared.