For the next two weeks, the world and all other issues would be omitted. We were two people alone in a hospital room. We allowed no visitors. We had two weeks of near-silence with each other and my increasing helplessness. I tended to tangle the IV and misplace the oxygen tube. As I started to say earlier, I could feel no sensible interest in the future. The moments became extraordinarily dimensionless - not without value but flat and a great deal emptier. When you learn you're fatally ill, time becomes very confusing, perhaps uninteresting, pedestrian. But my not caring if I lived or died hurt Ellen. And I was grateful that I could indulge my cowardice toward death in terms of living for her.
Harold Brodkey, This Wild Darkness: The Story of My Death
aids, cowardice, death-and-dying, hospital, life, time