Placemat #1

Working in a bar, you make a lot of connections. Residents and workers from the shops around the neighborhood frequent places for a number of years. You get to know these people pretty good and then... they die.

One, two, sometimes three in a year. After funerals guests come back to the bar and eat and drink. They tell stories of how great a guy or girl the deceased was. Some true, many lies. Doesn't matter, just another life coming to an end; completion.

The saddest cases though are the cancer victims. With cancer, there's a stage just before death that's like a walking dead. People look as if they're already decomposing as the cancer turns the final cells against them. It's plain to see that they've past the point-of-no-return.

They come to the bar to say, without literally saying, their goodbyes. Whispers must echo in their heads. Their display, while heartbreaking, is a reminder to us all that this could happen to any of us and will happen to probably half. Just keep drinking to forget and maybe this brutal thief will not take us. We're all aware of the horrific way that we've treated our own bodies.

No one certain about why. I mean by that; if a heavy smoker dies from lung cancer, we blame the cigarettes and likewise if a heavy drinker dies from liver cancer we blame the alcohol. But we know people who smoke and drink more than the other and they haven't died yet of have from a less painless death.

I watched my mom die in 2008. She was a saint, a prayer warrior for many. She never drank or smoked but got breast cancer that spread to her bones before it was discovered.

I just stayed with her and held her hand, thinking what could she have done to deserve this awful, painful death. None of us prayed allowed, though we'd on many occasions witnessed her powerful prayers. I don't know if any of us prayed in silence. There wasn't much faith left in our family, and the only one who could or would restore it with words could not speak.

It was such a long, drawn-out, horrible ordeal that even as her life left her there was a feeling of relief that we all shared. It was over and we said she was in a better place. Then we got some cheeseburgers. What?

I don't know why but when there's a death among family or close friends, we eat. And we don't eat any health food either.

And tonight, the friends of a bar regular, a cancer victim, have flooded in to the bar and ordered shots, beer, hamburgers, steaks, and french fries. Why do we eat in the wake of such a horrible death. Is it a dare to the carcinogens or a concession that they'll soon get us all?