He is watching television with infantile comprehension & absentmindedly automatically crumbling a biscuit into long cold tea.

He is more than 3 times my age, physically powerful, mentally enfeebled, and he is sick, long, deep, pained coughs & wheezes dredging up phlegm shot through with blood that falls onto his pyjamas and congeals on his chin in his sleep.

He has dreams, when he was well they sent him sprawling out of bed back into the shell scrape in Borneo or Burma or wherever he left half himself in when he was younger then I was when I first met him.

Tonight there are no dreams, illness robbing him of the nightmares Dementia could not & he sleeps more or less peaceably, deaf to the machine forcing air up his nose & down into his lungs.

Twice that night we wake him to change, once we find him half fallen between the bed & the wall & strain to roll him back into bed then up to the sitting position, too tired to resist, all shifting eyes & stutterous breathing.

He has a sore leaking through his underwear, 2 inches across and raw. Shaking hands go to it and are held back, pinned to a thigh with one hand while three others clean & strip & replace pads & finagle tape & then he is rotated back down into bed, eyes darting, neither understanding nor trusting.

The room stinks of urine again within a few hours and the process repeats.

I leave and go home and sleep while the country celebrates and do not think on him again until his name crosses my desk marked dead some 3 years later.