Sim Carter: Past Tense Imperfect

“Someone died here today.” “Pardon?”  I wonder if I’ve heard correctly. It’s awkward, unsettling somehow, hearing the old woman who lives next door to you  talk about dying while you’re sitting by her bedside in a hospital room at Cedar Sinai.  Margaret, 86, is sitting up, a couple of bright white pillows behind her, a tray table straddling her bed. I look out the hospital room door half expecting to see a gurney with a sheeted figure rolling by.  “On this floor. Someone died on this floor.” Margaret looks at the open door too. “The nurse told me most of the patients on this floor have brain or spine injuries.” As if that answers it. She, Margaret, doesn’t have a brain injury, that’s for sure. She has–or had–colon cancer and she’s been in the hospital for a few days now, recovering from major surgery. A colectomy. Earlier this summer, her doctor, worried that she’s anemic, sent her for a colonoscopy.  It falls to me, her next door neighbor, to gi...

I can't help it. Every year when May hits I become obsessed with aging. I find myself a permanent place on the pity pot and I just stay put. I'm turning 63 this week, and it's the end of the world as I know it. Margaret,  our staunchly independent neighbor, an elderly widow   of 85—a fact she says I should keep to myself because people make so many judgements about age–doesn't obsess over things like aging or waste her time with trivialities out of her control, she just gets on with it. "We only have the one life", she'll say. "We ought to be grateful for it while we're here." Margaret's husband passed away over twenty five years ago. It's not as though she doesn't think of him—" We used to go to the dances together"  she tells me " All I have to do is put on our music and it's like he's right here with me "—but she refuses to mope around living in the past.  She's organized, efficient, thorou...