AUSTIN, Texas, Apr. 1, 2006 — Ah, it's April Fool's Day.

A friend is lying in Brackenridge Hospital. She had a massive stroke. Probably on Monday or Tuesday. She was found unresponsive on Friday.

I thought of stealing some of her words from an e-mail she sent early Monday to FFP. They were discussing other sad news of late. But it seems too crass. But she did refer "the proverbial 'bringing it on home.'" So I stole that. For the title.

Hospitals are depressing places. ICU more

so. None of the patients around are all that well. The visitors look distraught sometimes and the limited visiting and extreme of tubes and stuff makes it all that much harder.

Another friend, who was 89, recently died. Oddly my friend in the hospital cooked food and made pies for his family on Monday. You go through periods when illness and death stalk around you. Not touching you maybe. Or barely, maybe you get a headache from not eating because you are too busy worrying about someone else, rescuing the dog and have to eat something you bought in a hospital. But you aren't sick and you may not die for years.

The present is a fleeting moment, the past is no more; and our prospect of futurity is dark and doubtful. This day may possibly be my last: but the laws of probability, so true in general, so fallacious in particular, still allow about fifteen years.

— Gibbon, Memoirs

I read an article in The New Yorker recently. Calvin Trillin wrote to clear up and expand on Alice, has late wife, starting with things he'd said about her in his usual humorous writings. He mentioned that in her writings she'd talked about the "existential paradox that we all experience: we feel that we are immortal, yet we know that we will die." It feels like our consciousness couldn't just cease to exist (we've never known not being) and yet we know everyone dies. This paradox has led to religion; to despair and to joy; to confusion and denial. I think only humans are capable of realizing that their time will come. But maybe not.

We've found out that another friend has Multiple Myeloma. She is enduring some harsh treatments hoping for a remission. My mother died in 2002 from complications of this disease.

Some times are sad and scary and you feel like you have endured some sucker punches to the gut. But we go on.