Sunday, July 08, 2012

Time passes always forward

Not much to say or do about the way life unfolds. It's too late to turn the clock backward. It's too late to rearrange behavior that's long past done.
But now it's summertime and windy and hot, and the South Plains appear both glorious and dangerous.
Our neighbor has dissolved into a dream of illusion brought about by the ravages of age and dementia, and it's sad. His wife, also elderly, can be seen tending her roses in the front yard, while the weeds grow wildly across the lawn. She yearns to have him home, but she's afraid of his mercurial behavior as his personality devolves to an unrecognizable tapestry beneath a haze of fantasy and nightmare, from which he has no escape. 
Death, I'm sure, cannot be far from its visit to him, and to her. My love will be saddened and cry when it occurs. But there is no mercy when death comes knocking. Only the secure knowledge that one day, your time will come. One can only hope to have a thread of dignity remaining when that dark-cowled figure with the heartless grin reaches out to grip one's heart, and stop this lifetime's clock.