Settling in comfortably, Bill turned his head toward the open window. If his strength would allow, he would lean forward to breathe in the fresh air. He always hated the smell of hospitals and doctors' offices, which, fortunately, he rarely had to encounter until recent years.
His family was blessed with good health, and except for the death of his parents, he was able to live most of his life without worrying about the awful smell and the tragedies it brought with it.
Now, reflecting on his life, Bill found it strange. Somehow, he never felt he had lost his ability to think critically, though he wasn't sure if it was because he just couldn't realize what he had lost or if he truly hadn't lost anything at all.
In any case, Bill remembered most of his life. Many of his old friends seemed to have forgotten a lot, which always troubled him. He remembered his childhood, the rules his mother enforced, and the quarrels with his siblings, in which he often broke those rules.
He remembered elementary school and even most of his teachers. He remembered the day he first met his wife, although at that time they were just colleagues. He remembered when their relationship grew into something more.
"Yes," Bill thought aloud, "my life wasn't bad." If he could change anything, it would only be that he had outlived his wife.
"Three years," he sighed again, to himself.
Despite frequent visits from his children and grandchildren and outings with old friends, Bill always felt a void in his life.
He felt it the day she died and continued to feel it even now, on the day he knew he would soon die.
He couldn't express it in words, and objectively he understood that he couldn't know such information. Besides God, Bill believed no one could know when the Father would call his children home.
And yet he knew. He knew it as clearly as he knew the grass was green, or that he would no longer be able to rise from this bed to feel the fresh air.
Without fear or panic, knowing his family had just left, Bill could only lie and reflect on his time on Earth.
Throughout his life, Bill understood his place in the grand scheme. He knew where he needed to be and what he needed to do. He recognized his successes and failures, his strengths and weaknesses.
There were few people throughout his life who were as content with their lives as he was. This truth was as clear to him now as it was decades ago.
Those who punished themselves for imagined failures were as foreign to him as anything death could offer. To him, failure was only in the lack of effort; even if a project didn't succeed, it was not a failure if a person did everything they could. In Bill's mind, there were no failures—things either were or they weren't.
He was proud of this.
Through the lens of history, how many men could boast of living as honestly as he did? Of course, he had limitations—everyone does. But he understood what sacrifice was. He knew that a person could only progress when they set a goal, and in choosing that goal, a person establishes boundaries, sacrificing potential. What made him proud was not the sacrifice of potential, but the courage he displayed in pursuing his goal.
As a parent and grandparent, he told the young people around him that though they had the potential for everything, it didn't mean they could be everything. He knew that a person must find a goal and establish a routine. In this routine, a person first loses a part of themselves, but when they reach the other shore, a whole new world of possibilities opens up before them.
He learned this lesson from his parents and fortunately never forgot it. He knew that although setting a routine could be challenging or intimidating, he was happy to live in the freest and most open country in the world.
His personal God was loving and all-powerful, and although Bill didn't often attend religious services after retiring, he did his part by helping the oppressed, the poor, and the abandoned.
He stood up for what he believed was right, not in a grandiose sense, because that wasn't his role, but he stepped in when necessary because, as his father taught him, "Evil triumphs when good people do nothing."
Suddenly, interrupting these thoughts, a slight smile appeared on Bill's lips. To be honest, he admitted to himself that he spent most of his life working. Only upon retiring did he begin to volunteer his time, perhaps just swapping one kind of work for another.
"Well, the truth is somewhere in the middle," he said with another quiet chuckle.
As his vision began to blur, he couldn't help but wonder when exactly it would happen, but he knew there wasn't much time left.
His reflections continued; he recalled the difficulties he faced in life. He married early and settled down, and neither he nor his wife came from well-off families. Those early years were the hardest.
Unable to afford a house, but unwilling to pay rent, he received assistance from his father's loan to take out a small loan with which he bought a rundown house.