how much of her remains?

And her?

She speaks sometimes. Not a great deal. I don't know how much she recognizes me. She will smile. She will respond to my questions, at least on occasion. Usually, it is just "yes" or "no." Sometimes we will get a full sentence.

She moves her hands. With some help, she has even fed herself. She has a great fondness for soft ice cream. And my father brings her mashed sweet potatoes, which she also seems to love.

I wonder, sometimes, when I watch…when I watch those beautiful, luminous eyes of hers…how much of her remains. How much of the woman I knew and loved and admired?

My nightmare is that she is still in there, someplace, unable to speak, unable to move…raging against the dying of the light.

Such a thing is not to be considered. It would be kinder if she were not there at all…if she had, somehow, moved on to whatever place it is that awaits us…(insert the image of the celestial sphere, the blue crystal dome of heaven, turned by mystic clockwork engines …and she, the traveler of the tarot deck, comes, pauses, considers, passes on, through the boundary of What Is, sees what we may not yet perceive…)

Kinder, yet harder, for it would mean she would never return to us.

And there is part of me, hopeless yet ever hoping, that it is only a matter of time, or reconnections, or resumed neural linkages, and one day…maybe after many summers…there will come the morning…

The morning she looks out into the room. Sees her husband. Smiles. Says Thank you for waiting. Reaches for his hand.