RAM: The Open Book

It is Sunday. I sit at the table with the coffee and pastries. I let the others discover the treats on their own as they file into the kitchen. Why shouldn’t they be as surprised at the gesture as I was? The Sunday paper is here. This week it is the Chronicle. It almost always is. Sometimes someone will get us the LA Times instead. It depends on who is buying the paper and where they are from. I take the funnies into my friend so he can read them. The rest of us split up what’s left.

The brother comes into the kitchen and asks me to go into the bedroom. It’s the morphine. My friend is sitting up in his bed, pretending to read the paper. He can’t read anymore because of the multiple pages the morphine creates. I keep telling him to just pick one of the pages to focus on, but he says it doesn’t work that way. He asks me to read the funnies for him. He keeps saying That’s not funny! I respond with Sometimes the funnies aren’t funny. Sometimes they are very dull.

That is one thing we are not short of around here. Friends. They come in all ages and sizes, genders and humors. They each have a part that they play in this dying thing. It doesn’t matter which one of them brought the coffee, it was all of them, collectively, to me. They, these friends, are our outside support. They smile for us and give us big hugs. Catch us when we are ready to collapse. They would be there for us if we needed to cry, but we haven’t had the time to be so self indulgent. They are our second tier of life support. Some of them are new to us, people who heard through this small town’s grapevine that we needed help. Some of them don’t know my friend, and to this day have not gone in the room to meet him. They know me, or the boyfriend, or the brother, or the doctor, or the hospice people. There can never be too many people at a dying.

When we wake, someone will check to see if he is still alive and his line is clear. When all is well, we go on about our day.

Coffee. I want coffee. Nobody else in the house has a coffee jag like I do in the morning. The rest of them can shower. They can brush their teeth and dress before they have the dark magic brew. Not me. I’ll sit on the couch until someone brings me my cup of coffee, until noon if I have to.

I go to the door to let the day in. Forever the sun shines here and it’s already been doing so for hours. Outside the screen door sits a big white bag and four large paper cups with lids. Someone must have known that I was in town. The coffee and pastries were delivered by an unknown friend. Not unknown, just anonymous.