Nothing More

Sitting on the couch this morning with my book and coffee, I looked up, thinking there wasn’t anything but this; that after this there’s nothing; that you’re taken out of your life, which might be good or bad, and the only meaning now is what’s left behind, fragmentary, mosaiclike, often unreadable or indecipherable, with those who must try to adjust or, themselves, I guess, perish, as my grandfather did many, many years ago of a ruptured gut at his kitchen table nine months after his wife died, at sixty-three, of liver cancer in their bedroom in the back of the house, and the window was open, and I could feel the breeze. I wouldn’t see my wife anymore.