“I Want You”

The Last Person

I met a young woman, perhaps 25, at a party. She’s a nurse who works in a busy emergency room that specializes in heart patients. People who have heart attacks and strokes go to her hospital.

I asked her if she ever spoke to people just before they died. She said yes, that it happened frequently. I asked her for a specific example. She said,

“A few weeks ago a man came in that had just had a heart attack. He told me that his wife had died a few weeks earlier. ‘I’ve been learning how to cook and clean and take care of myself’ he said. ‘I’m starting to get used to life without my wife.’ Then he turned pale and died.”

The last person we ever see in life could be a stranger.

But there are worse things than dying guided by a pretty nurse.

The Fighter

He is in his thirties. Old enough to be ugly from the battles but young enough to still have fight left. He is a native Canadian and he’s drunk, just like everybody else in the bar.

He’s a drunken Indian. At least that’s what the whites call him. The little group at the next table are the only ones in the crowd. He can’t hear it but he knows they say it, and other things, “chug” muttered under their breaths when they see his people. The First Nations.

He’s drunk and angry and he punches his wife. Hard enough to knock her back a few steps, send her stumbling into bar stools. One of the white guys stands up and comes for him, he balls a fist but gets hit in the face, hard, brutally.

Then several more times as he falls. He feels the crunch in his face as the bones crack, hears his wife screaming “stop!” over the shouting. He is powerless. Rage fills his eyes, his life of pain and frustration and hardship brimming up. Then he is unconscious.

The Lovers

Another year has passed. The couple sit on a couch in a warm living room. The tree is still sparkling. The remnants of a hangover still cling to them but this is not stopping them from having a couple more drinks.

The brain cells damaged in the previous few days have not yet regenerated which contributes to a mood of hilarity. Tickling, teasing, pet names and jokes that no one else would understand or tolerate are spread around liberally.

It’s fun.

“I love you”, she says, and he responds in kind. Then she starts to cry.

“I feel as though I’m going to lose you”, she sobs. “I don’t know what I would do if I ever lost you.”

He tells her that they have a lifetime to live together. But he knows he cannot guarantee it. What is a lifetime, anyway? Every one of us will meet our day, and time passes by so quickly.

He says their spirits will live together forever. “I don’t want a spirit”, she says, “I want you!”