A. G. Mojtabai

When I'm not teaching, I work at the inpatient unit of St. Anthony's Hospice
in Amarillo, Texas. It's a serious place, but not only serious: it's a house that
contains everything, including laughter, comedy, farce, pettiness, terror, and
peace; truly a house where "all our compulsions meet," as Philip Larkin observed
of churches.

One afternoon at the hospice, I was summoned to a patient's room to straighten
out a lifting apparatus--one of those hanging hand-pulls, or grab-bars, that are
supposed to dangle over a patient's bed. The patient, an old man, was unable to
speak, struggling to breathe, but still trying to communicate; he kept on point-
ing overhead. The young woman tending him, his granddaughter, thought the
device was what he wanted. He was obviously too weak to use it, but he was point-
ing directly overhead, and all we could see directly overhead was the triangular
hand-pull knotted up in its chain. So I struggled for long minutes, intensely, ab-
surdly, with that chain.

It was quite futile, and typically myopic of me--a comedy of mixed signals,
as I think back on it now. The man before me was dying, and pointing--point-
ing out what might have been the one thing needful to see, and there I was com-
pletely engrossed in fiddling with the gadgets on his bed.

Then the old man stopped pointing; his hand fell away. His breathing had
grown noticeably less labored. He'd arrived at that moment I've seen many times
shortly before death, a frozen moment when the eyes open wide and stare intently,
unhurriedly, with perfect calm, lucidity, and impenetrability. Utter inscrutabil-
ity. In the Bible Belt, they call it angel gazing. All I can say is that his eyes were
trained on something upon or beyond the ceiling. I thought of an antique word:
Behold. He beheld--he seemed to; as to what he beheld, here, my imagination
would fly, but fails--I stumble--

There was nothing much I could do before leaving the old man and his grand-
daughter for their precious last moments together except to fetch another pillow
and try to realign the patient's head, now at an odd angle. Then--nothing more
being asked of me--I went out.

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