Down to the Essentials

As I helped my nephew care for my dying father this morning—sponge bath, change of shirt, that sort of thing—it struck me that my father has begun to look like a study by Da Vinci or Durer. Here are the half-skeletal legs of a dying man, the loose flesh over his skull, the nose, ears, and even eyebrows showing decades of—of what? Of wear? Of gravity? My father, naked on a rented hospital bed—startling, a little scary, but beautiful, like an old, old master sketch in charcoal or conte crayon, monochromatic, basic, and illustrating something essential.