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Show 212 It is six months since my first confrontation with Doom, back at the teaching hospital. It comes now at odd and overwhelming moments, swimming with Virginia at the pool, turning on the evening lights against the winter darkness, riding past a cemetery. (How brave they all are, I think, to have passed that moment of death.) And, of course, at bedtime, when the lights should go off. "People will just think I'm crazy if I share this sort of thing," I am telling Faith over the telephone. She had called to see how I was doing. I had not said anything about this to anyone before now. I have considered it a private spiritual crisis. "You should know by now about medication side-effects," she chastises. "This one is typical of the drug Dr. Jessop was experimenting with then." It seems so long ago that Dr. Jessop's name has crossed my lips. But suddenly I remember the moment of terror I experienced the day Paul Newman turned 70. It came with the inability to stop moving, those awful days of perpetual motion. It is true that these feelings have been with me ever since that day; I have simply been too preoccupied with my very survival to pay them much attention. "Why didn't anyone tell me this could happen?" I am wanting to know. "I don't know," she answers. "I really do not know." |