The end game

When I want to remind myself how to write, I pull out my copy of Ernie Pyle's dispatches from World War II. I turn to The Death of Captain Waskow written at the Italian front on January 10, 1944. Casualties were being brought down a mountain trail on the backs of mules under a full moon. Pyle was with a group of GIs waiting in a cowshed when four more bodies came down. "This one is Captain Waskow," they were told by the soldiers leading the mules. Pyle records what happened next:

One soldier came and looked down, and he said out loud, "God damn it." That's all he said, and then he walked away. Another one came. He said, "God damn it to hell anyway." He looked down for a few last minutes, and then he turned and left. Another man came. I think he was an officer. It was hard to tell officers from men in the half light, for all were bearded and grimy dirty. The man looked down into the dead captain's face, and then he spoke directly to him, as though he were alive. He said: "I'm sorry, old man." Then a soldier came and stood beside the officer, and bent over, and he too spoke to his dead captain, not in a whisper but awfully tenderly, and he said: "I sure am sorry, sir." Then the first man squatted down, and he reached down and took the dead hand, and he sat there for a full five minutes, holding the dead hand in his own and looking intently into the dead face, and he never uttered a sound all the time he sat there. And finally he put the hand down, and then reached up and gently straightened the points of the captain's shirt collar, and then he sort of rearranged the tattered edges of his uniform around the wound. And then he got up and walked away down the road in the moonlight, all alone. 

I thought of that several times at Arden Courts yesterday: When I first got there, and Nicole told me "She's had a lot of visitors this morning; all the staff have been by." When Sally from across the hall saw me and said, "Oh Bill, this has been so hard on all of us." When I caught glimpses of Mel and Wilbur, visiting spouses like me, and remembered how hard they worked to get May to smile when I wasn't there. And when I thought about that first day I came to meet with Betsy, to set up hospice care, and stopped to chat with Courtney in the lobby -- and she said, "I can't look at you," so we stood back-to-back and talked until Betsy arrived. This is a place where everyone knows what the end game is. But May was so young. And when she smiled, you could forget why she was there.