on giving up

grandpa died yesterday at five o'clock. mom thinks he wanted to die, has wanted to die for years now. he held grandma's hand until the end of it.

we learned words like multi-system organ failure, co-morbidities, terminal wean, agonal breathing. strange, how precise the language of death. how one can single out the nanosecond when the body transforms from living to dead.

but they didn't have to turn off the vent. he waited until his family surrounded him like a makeshift womb, and only then did he let his heart stop.

.shower.and.be.showered.

I remember when rain first fell in the deserts. I was there. We were nothing more than wanderers at that point, shuffling across the sands, not entirely certain what we were looking for. The desert is so vast that we couldn't really imagine an end to the arid expanse. We were trapped between the ennui of sitting stoicly in place, or the fruitlessness of travelling aimlessly through the uniform land.
So we walked.

And as you can imagine, water was always difficult to come upon. We ripped up cactuses, carried what we could from any oases we found, and even resorted to licking the sweat off our brow. As much as our travelling lacked any goal, we were always on the search for more water. We sucked on stones to keep the spit in our mouths, and would compare with each other to see whose stone whittled away faster.

And when the rain first fell, there was certainly a moment of confusion. Here all at once was a blessing of water from the sky of all places (for, really, how did it all get up there in the first place?), and yet it was splattering down all about, rather than any cohesive trickle that we could capture. It was miracle and mockery.
And nonetheless, we all looked upwards as it fell down on us. Those of us caught by ourselves peeled off the sticky fabric that clung to our skin and learned what it was to shower and be showered.
We closed our eyes and caught what we could in our mouths.