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  • At the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota
  • William Kloefkorn (bio)

Almost embarrassed to be healthy I sit waiting for my younger son, no longer young, to return with the good news all of us deserve: benign, treatable, nothing to lose any additional sleep over. Earlier, we awakened to a wet mid-March snowfall, Minnesota doing its level best not to disappoint, flakes so large I walked all the way from our room to the shuttle with my tongue out. [End Page 105] Our bodies do whatever they can, don't they, to outlive themselves - medication for the moment, humility before sleep for the hereafter. Your son disappears into that room you were advised by way of a large sign not to enter. You find a cushioned chair not far from a long-leafed plant to await his return. You know that when you entered this place snow was falling, covering alike the just and the unjust, the upright as well as the fallen. Without thinking too much about it you nonetheless believe that when you leave this place you will be grateful to have been, to be being yet, one of them.

William Kloefkorn

William Kloefkorn is the author of Sunrise, Dayglow, Sunset, Moon (Talking River) and Restoring the Burnt Child (U of Nebraska P).

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