If I am an old man now, then I‘m also a child.

My crumpled hands strain across white hospital sheets, glide across white hospital sheets, then fresh, pale, sickly. The children all around me clutch recycled stuffed animals with yearning to live. We old men talk about the war. It’s funny, the way death follows your whole life, a silent passenger, the only proven fate after all. We’re born in this sterile gauze; these cotton sheets; bed pans at once both polished and dull from compulsive scrubbing; a single window and shades that don’t keep out the light; the smell of lemon Pledge and an idea of continuity, a room with other babies, the first, unspoken, unconscious thought: one day, I’ll die here.

I’m sick now and it’ll be my time. It’s been a good run and he’s been kind enough to let me think I’ve done a good job cheating. Today, the parts that didn’t belong to someone else are made of metal and plastic. Most of me died gracefully already. The broken bones, wisdom teeth, and the heart, the liver: they all knew when it was time and cracked, pulled, failed from this world, but not me. I refused to go out a martyr.

Those formative years spent at Mercy in the capable hands of Dr. Holder, who I could call Lisa, they were preparation for tomorrow. Until then, these wires and tubes that bring in air and water and liquefied food and blood, and take out piss and shit and bad blood, they’ll keep me company along with the slow, rhythmic pulse of my assisted heartbeat. I’ll cling to them like teddy. And all I can hope for is one chance to slip out of this blank place I’ve lived in for the past six months long enough to spit up undignified and embarrass my children one final, joyous time. I would give anything to breathe something real before I leave this hospital room and this world with the rest of the wires and the machines and every list I ever made and never finished.