Pursued By Mercy

He was known as a mean old man. Resentful! Bitter! Someone said that his bitterness was justified. His beloved wife died, giving birth to their one child. The child died shortly after that from complications. “He has reason to be bitter,” they said in town. He never went to Church and never had anything to do with anyone. When, in his late sixties, they carried him out of his apartment and over to the hospital to die, no one visited, no flowers were sent. He went there to die alone.

There was a nurse. Well, she wasn’t actually a nurse yet, just a student nurse. She was in training, and because she was in training, she didn’t know everything that they teach you in school about the necessity of detachment — the need to distance oneself from one’s patients. She befriended the old man. It had been so long since he had friends, he didn’t know how to act with one. He told her, “Go…