The Look In Her Eyes

No, it isn't what you think when I say I was enraptured by the look in her eyes-- the eyes were those of a woman who was dying and knew she was dying.... I did not know her well-- she was the wife of someone my wife worked with in the prosaic world, the world of time and schedules and appointments, the world of taxes and getting and spending and eating and sleeping and making love (for the lucky ones), a world filled with the nightly news and TV and a relentless social media, a world that both commands and ignores--but not the world this woman was soon to leave for, an unique voyage she must take all alone: somehow she knew this as she lay small and quiet in her hospice bed-- past speaking any more, not even to her old husband. But though quiet as a mouse or a saint, yet she smiled, at all in the room it seemed, though when I went in turn to say my good-bye to this near-stranger, I thought, 'She's smiling at me!' and then I thought-- 'She looks happy!'-- but how can that be I wondered...until her eyes gleamed with a light I have never seen before in human eyes--it was her soul I knew that knew, and her soul had no fear, death being less than air, less than nothing to it-- her soul was ready. [posted 4/29/21]