The Sandwich

I saw a dead guy the other day. My dad is in the hospital and this guy was his roommate. When I arrived for that visit my dad told me the man had just died five minutes before. It wasn’t until later, after the family had left and we thought we were alone, that I saw what I saw. Before we got down to personal details my dad asked me to check if we were truly alone. I poked my head around the curtain, and there lay the so recently deceased man. His face was not covered with a sheet. He was completely still but animated, frozen in a strong pose: mouth open, stopped in the middle of a yawn, face puckered and stretched as if bemoaning. His colour was pale, orange-yellow-gray translucent white.

It was the thought of him that affected me. Thinking about the lifelessness was more morbid than anything the body could imply. My conception of what had occurred caused me to view the body differently, and afterward the site of the body became the focus of my ideas about death. I sat with my dad for a while, and sometime later the nurses came to deal with the unfortunate man. I noticed a tray of food that they had pushed out of his former curtained room. On the tray lay a plastic covered plate with a sandwich, yogurt, and some kind of dessert on it. It was the sandwich that got me. That was his sandwich, his alone. The distance between that sandwich and its rightful owner seemed insurmountable and it was that insurmountability that struck me. Thinking of the lost experience is what identifies that there is a distance, which in turn affirms his presence, absent but having once been. Without him the meaning of him gains value.