Hearing death pronounced

Somehow his casual hands seem like words and his thick chest like punctuation. Simply, "I'll just be gone a moment," they seem to say. But as you sit nearby, writing notes, an absence lingers. Then you realize the dead man is saying something else. Before you come to this, however, other things will have happened. You will step into the room and there on the bed will lie a body. At best it will be late into the night and, better still, you will be harried and pressed with demands. For then it's easier to set the dead aside as part of a larger duty. Regardless, there will lie a body. There will lie as well the difficulty. For the trouble with these bodies is that they don't care about you, yet they don't ignore you either. Instead, they radiate, like an invisible beacon, the words, "You too." And now and again you will hear it. You too. We two. You know how this goes. Attend to the other fallings - falling blood pressure, a drop in consciousness, a decreasing respiratory drive, the depressed mood of relatives. And, above all, manage. Manage symptoms, manage expectations, manage hope, manage to say something. Usually, this is when the dying begin to speak. Not their spoken words - which are about disease and worry and are sometimes confused, always unreal - but the other speaking. You will feel the familiar, distant itch of hope that they die on someone else's time, and the reason for the itch is that somewhere within the dying you begin to sense the growing refrain of "You too."