A New Plateau

Is it flat? Is it fair? Is it founded?
For the Countess, it is not merely a label of a stage of just any journey. The only journey.
Feeling bushed, napping more, feeling nauseous, eating far less, feeling pain, taking meds till now always rejected.
Life-sustaining blood components' counts dropping, more transfusions scheduled.

Taking it day by day. Still trying to smile and laugh on the phone or when visitors drop in, lethargic when afterwards alone with a Lady-in-Waiting whose wait is in dismay, a wait for plateau shifts she in no way desires, certainly yearning for release, but not the only release that can come. The only journey.

And a Page sits at a keyboard typing in words well knowing that the best syllables may be those semi-articulate ones his parrot pronounces to the Countess on the phone, utterances to which she responds with true cheer, life to life, proud a parrot is speaking with her.

A Page who has once attended another across these plateaux wishes that Lady-in-Waiting would not have to experience what is coming, knowing that she however will, both of them wishing the Countess that all the peace and dignity and grace and brilliance, scattered through her life, now be gathered into flaming strength no tear can douse.

For not just to these two is this Countess truly royal: There are all those Chicks of her Chicora Court, all those friends to whom she has always been known as giver and supporter, seldom taker, to brothers and sisters, their husbands and wives and children and grandchildren, to brothers- and sisters-in-law, their mates, their offspring, for generations often.

This plateau you are on now, dear Countess, is full of such inhabitants, all of us wishing it broad and even and smooth and durable, washing it with our tears and grateful for the cheer you offer, for the time to be shared, yearning all of us for our next meeting, the further away we may be, the longer we must wait, the firmer and more durable we wish this plateau. May it so long be new that it becomes old like mesas eroded to beauty.

Das Ereignis, daß Sein ist, west, zeitigt, nichtet, ereignet sich.