Some body

It made me think of my springer spaniel, Effie. I hadn’t thought that much about Effie, and I suddenly missed her. They’d brought her to see me one time at the hospital, to try to cheer me up, but Effie hadn’t recognized me. To her, I was just some body lying in a weird-smelling room who didn’t even scratch her.

It is now clear that the death of a loved one is to be understood as a mobile internal theater, virtually unrelated to some body lying in a coffin, and that this process of leave-taking is dreadfully unruly.

I looked at her lying there, so still and unmoving, her lovely face broken into pieces under the bandage. […] I was about to launch into the New Year’s Day annual Polar Bear Club Swim, a tradition clearly for lunatics, in the icy Atlantic waters of Coney Island, the freezing cold of Lake Michigan in Chicago and off the coast of Vancouver in the frigid Pacific, when suddenly I looked down and really saw her as Donna, not some body lying in a bed, designed to add to my general discomfort on earth.