A Body of Eighty-Seven Years - Miles Roa

          This body prepared the meals that nourished me. This body held me. This body washed me. This body warmed milk in a bottle for me.

          I prepared the last meal that nourished this body. I held this body. I washed this body. I pulled morphine into a tiny syringe for this body of eighty-seven years.

          Acetylcholine levels lowered. Brain tissue and nerve cells degenerated. The brain lost communication with the body, and everything slowed to a stop. An oxygen-deprived blueness creeped up the limbs and the heartbeat became undetectable.

          In the final years, this body was just a body. My grandmother rarely existed. She had no concept of the future and no memory of the past. I sat with her, aching to understand her experience. I was only able grasp the concept of reflecting on the past while navigating the present with the future in mind. I imagined her in some sort of limbo where, without question, the entirety of existence was limited to what was before her eyes. When things appeared, even fleetingly, they had only been precisely there and they would never be any different. She, unlike any conscious being, was experiencing the purest form of the present.

          She saw no future, and I could see only one. I fed her sixteen days before her end, unable to know this would be her final meal because the future doesn’t exist. The past builds as we laze, entombed in the present.

          It was the last time she saw me; not the last time she looked at me when I was caring for her in the final days, but the last time she truly saw me. She laughed the way she used to laugh years ago. Her eyes locked with mine, and before I could really understand the moment, it was gone. I tried to let the moment echo in my head, tried to solidify and fossilize her last, most precious laugh in my memory, but it was already in the past. I was too aware of the ever-moving present, and realized that soon she would be not just a body, but only a body. A body withered to a childlike sixty-two pounds. A body, cold and rigid, to be sat with for hours through the night. A body waiting for a steady-handed coroner to carry quietly away.

          I turned to her husband of sixty-eight years, in his own body of eighty-nine, and wondered if he saw his future in his wife’s present. Because with infinite possibilities, the only thing the future guarantees is a cold, rigid body.