A Final Report on Patient #2163 & Also, I Quit.

I walked unknowing into the twilight of her life,
a last glimmer of sanity before she departed.

Holey queens of lace, knights built of books: if she
could tell her story, it would be an adventure,
not a grim list of family and treatments, but a tale.
Of a girl dressed in black who understood
karma, and the curious way the world works –
not the real world that she dreaded, but rather
the secret stories that lay below the surface
and gave her an escape, into a land that
made sense to her fairy-tale heart.

It's a problem, of course, when a doctor starts
to believe a patient, but she was so sweet
and caring to everyone – especially those
we could not see – that how could I not
think her something different, something special?

So old, but not yet stained by the miseries of
life that had already hardened me, she was only a child,
really.  I thought she knew that, until one day
she handed me a note – "I know you believe with me,
I thought you should know; they're coming.
My time is over."

Startled, I told her that wasn't true, she still had time,
but she simply smiled and said,
my dear, don't you know?  everyone dies.

She closed her eyes then, an ancient, an ancestor,
a wise old woman who had kept up with the times.
Not the mistress of fantasy I had met, that first
naive day when I had been the new doctor, still
learning the ropes, young and jaded, not knowing who I
was, where I was, what I was, or what I would see:
[as I walked unknowing into the twilight of her life,]
a last glimmer of sanity before she departed.