“You’ll probably be just like my grandmother,” the soldier said. “My grandfather was in the hospital, he’s all old, he’s dying and my grandmother would not let the nurses give him a sponge bath. She made them let her do it.”

“Yeah, well that’s exactly what I’d do, you know that. I’d get in bed with you too.”

“I figured.”

“Well I’d do that, okay. But you wouldn’t want it any other way. You don’t like people touching you who are not me. You’d go insane having to sit still for that. Nice. That’s slick. Get it the way you want it but let me do the dirty work.”

He laughed. “Yeah, I wouldn’t like it. But I’d sure like watching you raise hell with them. You’d be bitching and I’d look at ‘em like I can’t control her,” he said with a smirk.

“Well you’re a dirty bastard. That’s what I’d think. Tricky and enjoying yourself to the grave.  I wonder why you get that. How come I can’t die first - Put you through all this crap?”

“No, no,” he said emphatically. “You know it won’t be that way. It’s not going to be like that.”

“Yeah, I guess I know that but why. Why, why, why?”

“It just won’t be that way. You have to stay around and be the light. You are the light for too many people, you have to stay and shine…”

He’s told me this before so I just glared.  Get one of these Special Forces guys you can’t mess with them at all when it comes to certain things.

pictured: Edvard Munch. By the Deathbed (Fever) c. 1915. Oil on canvas. 187 x 234 cm. Munch Museum, Oslo, Norway.