Be careful what you wish for

The Mayans predicted that the world was going to end yesterday. It appears they were wrong. Or at least I haven’t noticed that the world ended. Maybe I’m missing something—I’m not always totally attentive.

I wonder if the winter solstice and the failed end of the world made things go wacky and caused me to have a strange dream last night. I dreamed that I asked God to let me rewind my life and let me go back in time and spend just one day with Mike. God granted my wish. But perhaps I should have been more specific with the timeframe of my wish. The day I got to spend with him was a day in the final weeks of his life.

 

He was living at Edenwald, in the nursing unit, under hospice care. He and I didn’t talk about anything particularly heavy or memorable. We were just together. But I carefully observed details about him. How his hands looked, his arms, how his face had changed when he was becoming so thin and wasted. I kept looking at his hands, amazed that a person’s hands could change so much in only a few months.

I woke up, crying softly. I didn’t expect to spend that particular day with him, yet I was somehow still grateful that I got any time at all.

 

Tonight I put on the fingerpicks that he wore on his right hand when he played guitar. I remembered how his hands looked before he got sick and how beautifully he played. And I miss him.