I’m looking at her in the intensive care unit.

She had been assaulted nineteen years earlier

by a guy in a Ford F-150  driving on the one

way street on a Friday, presumably after his

shift and on his way to the bar and he rear

ended her and her brain felt pain and years later

exploded, blood flowing like the Black River

in spring, March actually, and rains seven to nine

inches in one day soaking and super saturating in

the spring ground and the river rages and I

do, too, about a totally unnecessary death if

only the guy on his way to the bar on a Friday

afternoon after work hadn’t, in that unbelievably

quick minute, looked down at his pager and not

at my wife’s car directly in front of  him.  And

the truth shall never be known, except what

difference would it make except perhaps in

some small measure to me and her children

for loving relational purposes to bring a

smidgen of closure to the insanity and perhaps

to a lot of lawyers, insurance companies and

physicians, monetarily speaking? And the only

grace in all this is that her lungs were donated

to a victim of  cystic fibrosis who was an

emergency room doctor who lived on to

heal, not to mention all the other organs and

to whom they went and what lives they saved

by my late wife’s grace. Amen and amen.