Je vais bien, ne t'en fais pas

Don't worry, I'm fine.

It has been 10 months, six weeks and six days since I last had a normal conversation with my dearest friend Harry Scott Shimp. The evening of October 28th, a Thursday. We spoke of love, we spoke of baseball, we spoke of things eternal and trivial. We spoke.

The next day was not real. He couldn't make it out of the car for his chemo/radiation/kill-everything-in-you-just-short-of-killing-you treatment. That Friday morning and afternoon we went to the hospital emergency room where he carried on a polite conversation with the girl helping him. He made her laugh and smile. He made her feel good as he lay dying.

He went into Hospice the next day, then onto the morphine train to oblivia, then passing over to death at about 2:45 in the morning of November 6th, 2011, just a few hours before he would have had the chance to say goodbye to the love inside him, his daughter Katherine. Some say it worked out better this way, that she should remember him as she knew him and not as the weakened shell of a man lying in the bed with black, morphine eyes of death. I feel extremely fortunate to have had my ex-wife and my two daughters with me on the Saturday afternoon before he went. He smiled and called their names. I don't think witnessing him in his weakened state affects their memories of him at all. They loved the man, they will always hold his memory dear and close in their hearts. I miss him so much.

On the Tuesday of that last week I think it was, after a nurse came into the room and asked about his pain level on a scale of 1 to 10, to which he replied "about a 7", she left the room to go get the morphine and he turned to Ross and I and said "I don't have any pain, but they give you morphine here whenever you want it, so if it's all the same to you guys, I'm going to 'drug it up' a little before I check out." Which of course made us smile and laugh a bit, knowing that he was getting one over on the world even up to the very end.

I continued to come visit and have very short 3 or 4 word exchanges with him over the next few days, but he was so drugged up that I don't count those as real conversations.

He was the best friend ever. Ne me quitte pas. Ne me quitte pas.