So they tell to lie on your side and you come face to face with a bare wall. Fitting as you are bare in every manner… and you know. You’ve known for a while. As the sanitizing paper crinkles with each twitch, each thought, the wall becomes a blank slate, a screen for a life’s play in three parts. Like Blake’s eternity in an hour and the world in a grain of sand, a few solitary moments speak of many lives. The father’s path speaks of things to do, of days to come, of lessons yet to learn and to teach. The child’s path takes you to the first time you heard God’s whisper. It’s going to be all right. Have no fear. It will all be all right.

You stick to the paper, adjust and try to find comfort when there is none to find, and laugh, once again, at the bareness of the moment. Nurses talk in the hall, muted by the door, and the clicking of keyboards in the paperless world of modern medicine. You are alone, stuck to paper, staring at a wall. And you know.

Oddly the blank wall just inches from your nose conjures the contradictions and illusions of life. In this moment, the one that you’ve known about for months, you are presented with the one question that haunts all of us at some point. What’s next? And to think that many that I’ve looked up to, never looked up to find an answer. And once more, I hear the whisper, heard as a child. It is soft and it is welcome…It’s going to be all right.