It wasn’t a morning like any morning. “Science wouldn’t take my body,” she said. Cataloging her ills from carpal-tunnel to cancer. “The pills keep me alive,” she said. It was not a moment anything in my life had prepared me for. I didn’t know what she expected of me. She didn’t know what she expected of me. There was a canyon of uncertainty. I gasped. There was silence. There was a long pause. A seemingly endless pause. And I asked what she wanted for breakfast. And I ordered ham omelets from Sibri’s. And we talked of shampooing the carpet. And listened to CNN frame the political madness. And leaned back drowsily till Judge Judy at noon soothed us with a vision of the ordered universe we bet our young lives on.

Edward J. Gallagher

Bethlehem