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Numb
- Red Hen Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
31 Numb It is hard to give up after months of making lists, phoning doctors, fighting entropy. But when the end comes, a bending takes over, empties the blood of opposition and with a gentle skill, injects a blessed numbness. I know the air around me thinned when he stopped breathing, and though I did not faint, I could not stand to stay and watch his dank soiled clothes removed, his body turned and washed and shrouded. Someone led me out and someone sat me down and someone held me. I heard a sound leave my mouth, unearthly, unfamiliar. I uttered it only once. A few days later I dress carefully, as if the habit instilled in a woman who dresses for public appearances is as much a scar as a vaccination is. I let others take care of the particulars. Perhaps this surrender foreshadows my own old age when I have raged to exhaustion and finally have to go. The numbness wears off. I drive to the market, cook my own food, take scant note of desire with no one else to consider or contradict my choices. Something in me will never go on. Something in me will go on. ...