Essay
Preparing for a Surgery
All the words fly by
They call them the plain folk — the Amish and Mennonite. This was a time and place and peoples where I was rooted.
There’s a saying the plain folk have — that your life will flash before your eyes before you die. Western science calls it “paradoxical lucidity.” They formalized the words in papers, so it must be truth now. I haven’t faced the situation yet. Maybe it won’t be a series of visual images though. Maybe it will be all the words that swirl around the bed.
We all process life differently. Some of us are enriched by the sights of sunrises and sunsets, the mile-high clouds, the brilliant and myriad colors of the flowers by the roadside, at a resort, in a botanical garden, surrounding someone’s home, or by the thousand shades of green in the forest.
Some of us are enchanted by the sounds of footfall on pine needles, the birdsong in the fields, the gurgling sound of a brook or the rushing roar of Niagara Falls. By the whisper of a secret shared, or the boom of the drum from a boom box.
Those of us who love fragrance, smell our way through life — the first whiff of Pine Island, the sea life pungent on Great Egg Harbor Bridge, the smoky clam bake smells on Cape Cod, the nauseous bay at the boat dock on the way to Assateague Island…
