cup of dying

I once visited a woman on hospice in her home 3 times a week for hands on healing. It was honestly some of the most beautiful days I can remember. The way the autumn light slanted in through her windows onto her chair, where she lay in and out of awareness of her own death. At times she would fight it and others she would forget. She thought I was her priest and I would read passages to her from Psalms because it comforted her while I'd practice Reiki or ever so gently paw at her flesh and beg it to give her some fleeting relief. Her spine and hips had frozen in one posture and going to the toilet, a foot away from her chair, was a nightmarish ritual of yowling and scratching. Every time my heart would break for her. I never understood the caregivers that were always there, watching Jerry Springer and yapping on their phones. Couldn't they see the raven peeking in the window? Couldn't they feel the autumn turning into winter, the same claws of ice taking her an inch at a time as the claws she feebly waggled around trying to make some lasting sense of her decay? I could see the way her judgments had shaped her age, the walls around her heart made of steel, so thick and heavy and permanent they were never acknowledged. A lifetime of sandwiches and swatting away anything that might change her small and comfortable life. She had no family never had, I had just lost mine through deceit so deep it washed away any faded memory of love like how oil spills and takes over a blue and thriving sea until nothing can live there anymore. I too, was alone in my witness of the taking over of the black. Inch by inch, we were dying together. Her heart trying and wanting to break through the patterns of her tight mouth with it's pointed tongue, my heart too big and dumb shattered over our heads dumping glitter and confetti, desperate to illuminate the small precious moments of our death together, of our tired pitiful efforts to get right before the black would come into the room like an ocean through the window. She died that winter. I was so happy for her.