He was already breathing hard, just thinking the thoughts
in his head. He had them all in order, but would there be
time enough to tell them?
She was due to arrive any minute;
he rushed through his breakfast and kept one eye on
the driveway watching for her to pull in. He was fidgeting
with the newspaper, sipping his coffee growing cold, smiling
to himself about the stranger’s ad he’d answered.
He would be writing his memoir today and he couldn’t wait to
get started….
It’s true they were strangers, but in his world, no one was
ever a stranger for long. She was young, attentive, eager,
and on time. He asked his caregiver to make the pleasant
stranger a cup of coffee and bid the writer sit down in his easy chair,
then poured out his story as she took it down word-for-word.
It took him five hours to tell it. They took a break for a sandwich
at noon and as they ate, he was still telling her the story. She
confessed he would have to repeat most of what he said during
lunch because she had put her glasses and pen aside and didn’t
trust her memory with something so precious as a person’s memories.
He laughed. Oh, she would do just fine.
And then he coughed for a spell…
He always coughed when he laughed, and thus, he did a lot
of coughing that day. He didn’t have long to live, he told her
that when he first answered her ad, but once he started
speaking his story, he felt like he would live forever.
The oxygen he dragged along behind him was his lifeblood–and
his ball and chain–but today, he barely noticed it. Today he was
alive because he had a story to tell and someone to tell it to, and
laughter rang through the walls of the little trailer home and
drowned out all the bad times. He laughed because he was
looking back at his life and in the looking back, he thought
he had made the best of it.
His life. His story. His laughter.
He didn’t lose any of it, she made
sure of that….
“To have lived and remembered it well is to have lived twice.”
Kahlil Gibran
Doreen M. Frick
Doreen M. Frick is from Ord, NE.
