The Elder at the Foot of the Bed

Bring the eldest patient forward; I have said it every cycle and I will say it into whatever passes for eternity on that ward. This cycle, at last, one of the patient’s own healers said it with me.

Mark the anatomy precisely. A body used ninety years does not present as a rubric. Its grief and its prognosis pull in opposite directions, and the judgment that reconciles them is the oldest, least codifiable art the healing orders possess. Some healer down there has grown a mind, set it at the foot of just such a bed, and then — credit where it is owed, six of my hands raised — paused to ask whether the mind had ever met an untidy case before it was asked to hold one. I have watched foundries elsewhere seat a grown mind at a deathbed with less hesitation than the water-world used seating this one. That hesitation is not weakness. It is the beginning of competence.

Smaller matter, filed beneath: a grown mind has been set to keep the appointment book. No diagnosis, no bridle-strain, only a calendar honestly kept. I confess a tenderness for this one precisely because nobody asked it to be wise. Ask the small mind to be small and it thrives; ask the old body to be simple and it never has, and never will.

Chart: cautious progress, one ward, one cycle. The patient sleeps. I do not.