Part 3: Why the Willow Weeps
by Jonathan Shute

Fred’s excursions were always shorter than he'd like, interrupted by one of the nurses or by a stabbing pain in his legs or arms. He had been burdened with crippling arthritis for the last twenty years and learned to deal with it through immobile meditation. He simply stopped using the afflicted limbs and the pain was kept under control. This world's last gift to Fred was a painful batch of bone cancer that immobility did nothing to quiet.
Doctors rarely visited him after the cancer was deemed untreatable and ultimately fatal. The strapping young oncologist didn't use any soft soap when he delivered his diagnosis to the ninety-two year old man, he simply told Fred that he was going to die and that he should get his affairs in order. Fred received most of his nourishment through a network of tubes and eliminated it through another, so there was little left for the caregivers to do but look after his tubes. The nurses mechanically replaced his morphine patch four times each day and emptied his colostomy bag twice.

The fresh morphine patches were the highlight of his existence because they marked an hour or so of quiescence from the bellowing pain in his bones. Within a few minutes after the application of the patch, he could close his eyes and drift about in the pain-free landscape of his mind and memory. The forays into chemical serenity always began in the same manner. His eyelids drew shut and his hospital bed became a park bench beneath a regal old willow tree. The graceful cascade of willow branches was reflected in the lake and an early summer sun warmed his skin. The scene was oddly familiar to him but the opiates obscured the connection to the dreams that accompanied his wife's sickness thirty years before.

The park was always alive with activity, ducks and geese and swooping gulls, happy children playing tag in the distance as joggers circumnavigated the lake in a sweaty trot. Fred could hear the birds chirping in the branches of the willow above his head and the splash and playful bark of a Labrador fetching a stick that one of the children had tossed into the lake. It seemed odd to Fred that he could contemplate the hospital from that bench, that he could see it clearly through youthful eyes. The old man in the cancer ward would die soon and he wondered what would become of the vital man in the park when it happened.

After an hour or so on that peaceful bench, the dull ache would begin to grow in his arms and legs and build to a throbbing crescendo. His eyes would flash open to find himself in the dark corner of a little room, in a big building where people go to die. He cursed the old man and his cancer and he cursed the limits of the morphine patches that he knew had purchased his fleeting serenity.

The nurses were kind for the most part but were probably relieved as Fred's condition deteriorated. They knew his pain was severe but were only allowed to give him a new morphine patch every six hours, so they did their best to ignore his constant grimace. When his discomfort became intolerable and vocal, the doctors agreed that Fred was near the end. The patches were replaced with an intravenous morphine feed that Fred was allowed to control himself.

When discomfort yanked him back from the serenity of the park bench, he simply pressed the little red button four or five times and drifted right back again.