The Long Descent

In the hush of the hospice room, time became thin and fragile, like the final pages of an old diary. Days passed without words—only the steady ticking of machines, the rustle of blankets, and the low murmur of nurses who spoke around Edna as though she were already halfway gone.

But then—something shifted.

Her eyelids fluttered, and the faintest light sparked behind them, as though an unseen ember had found a breath of air. The nurses called it “a rally,” with practiced gentleness, a small surge before the long descent. But Edna felt none of their medical resignation. She felt pulled—called—toward something vast and familiar.

In her wheelchair, hollow-eyed and frail, Edna’s body was motionless. But Edna—the part that mattered—was already elsewhere.

She stepped out of herself as easily as slipping off a coat, and suddenly she was young again, barefoot in an empty field that seemed to stretch beyond the horizon. The grass brushed her calves, warm and alive. The air was rich with the songs of unseen birds. Her limbs obeyed her without complaint; her lungs filled with wind; her bones did not ache. She laughed—a sound so bright she almost startled herself.

There was no city here, no hospital, no dim window overlooking a world she no longer recognized. Only freedom. Only space. Only the joy of being—simply being—as if stripped of all burdens of time.

From the hilltop she saw shapes forming in the distance—figures she once knew, their silhouettes cut from memory and love. She felt her heart leap, but she did not run. She had learned patience in her long years; she had learned that what is meant will come.

The out-of-body journeys grew more frequent. By day she sat in her chair, hands clasped, eyes distant—nurses assuming she was fading into confusion. But in truth she was walking sunlit fields, chasing butterflies, braiding reeds, whispering to the dead as though they’d merely stepped out for a moment and would return any second now.

No one could see her smile—but she smiled. No one could hear her song—but she sang.

The lines between worlds thinned. The bed and fields existed at once, layered like two transparencies being slowly aligned. The longer she lingered, the more the wheelchair felt like a shadow, and the more the fields felt like her rightful place.

In the waking world, her hands twitched, her lips parted, her eyes shone with something both radiant and far away.

“She’s coming back,” someone whispered.

But they were wrong.

She wasn’t coming back—not to them. She was going forward, toward the promise that one day the figures in the field would resolve into faces she loved, and arms would open to greet her, and the quiet ache of living would finally give way to the peaceful grace of returning home.