Letting Go

Justin George: It was 256 steps from the elevator to Room 212 at Tampa General Hospital. Each day, Janice Ryals held her husband's hand. It wasn't the hand left coarse by 30 years of cutting scrap metal, fixing air compressors, working under truck hoods. It wasn't the steady hand of a hunter, who bagged deer and turkey, whose riflery the Army trained.

It was a limp hand attached to a ghost with tubes dripping morphine or draining into colostomy bags.