The old man raised up, squinted, and tried to make out the person sitting in the chair across from his hospital bed. With carrot red hair and skin so pale it was almost transparent, the younger man had a distinct look.
And when the patient – Estus Marble – noticed his guest wearing a bright purple polo shirt and yellow slacks, he wondered if maybe he was being visited by a clown.
“Who are you?” Estus asked.
“Name’s Dearil Javaraya,” said the visitor. “I’m here to talk you through and walk you through your situation.”
It took only a second for Estus to figure out his “situation.” The last thing he remembered – before seeing Dearil – was his wife holding his hand and sobbing while his two daughters looked on with tears in their eyes.
“I guess you’re the Grim Reaper,” Estus said, matter-of-factly.
Dearil displayed an exaggerated frown.
“You hurt me, Estus,” he said. “That name sounds so … ominous. Look at me – have you ever seen the Grim Reaper look so pale yet dressed so colorfully?”
Estus shook his head.
“I don’t guess I’ve ever seen the Grim Reaper at all … until now,” he said. “But you have to be him. I mean, I’m pretty sure I’m dead.”
Dearil got up, scooted his chair closer to the bed, and sat down again.
“Really, Estus, I’m more of a counselor than anything else,” he said. “When it’s your time to go, you always get one. I’m yours.”
As Estus got a better look at Dearil, he realized his face was familiar, although he couldn’t quite place it.
“Are you somebody I know, or used to know?” Estus asked.
“Kinda,” Dearil said. “I guess I’m what they call in the movies a composite character. The guy with the red hair? That was the kid back in grammar school – 1959 I think it was – that you gave the eraser to. And this fish-like skin? It was that older woman you helped out in the pool when she passed out. That would’ve been around 1964. The purple and yellow clothes are in honor of that Minnesota Vikings fan you used to work with – the one you’d invite over to watch games because you thought he didn’t have many friends.”
Estus managed a slight smile.
“I’ll be honest with you,” he said. “I barely remember any of those things. And that thing with the eraser … I don’t remember at all.”
Dearil pointed at Estus and wagged his index finger.
“See, that’s what I need to help you with,” he said. “You were a good guy, Estus. You did a lot of really nice things … things you didn’t think about, but things that meant a lot to other people. People always seem to overlook the little things in life. Ultimately, they make up the big picture.
“The world was a better place with you in it. But you spent way too much time thinking about your mistakes. It made you miserable, and I don’t want you to be miserable.”
Estus sighed.
“I did a lot of bad things, too,” he said. “I didn’t deserve to have the good life I had.”
Dearil rolled his eyes.
“OK, this is the point where I tell you that life is one big book,” Dearil said. “But it’s not a bunch of chapters with the same plot from start to finish. It’s more like a compilation of short stories – they’re all different, it’s just you happen to be a character in each one of them.
“Sometimes you’re the hero, sometimes you’re the villain, sometimes you just have an uncredited role. It’s true for everybody. But I’m telling you, if somebody read that book from cover to cover, they’d have a pretty high opinion of you at the end of it. Your good outweighed your bad.”
Estus felt a sense of relief; if this was what “crossing over’ was like, it wasn’t so bad at all.
“So,” Estus said, “when you come get people, you show them friendly faces and tell them about their best selves?”
Dearil scoffed.
“Oh, good grief, no,” he said. “I show them who they were … and what they did – usually with one or more familiar faces, but not always. Fred Rogers, for example, saw the faces of all the people he made a positive impact on, most whom he never met. As you might imagine, I put in a lot of overtime for that one because it took days to get through.
“But then you have somebody like Adolph Hitler. He was shown more than six million different faces – and I made sure he got to take a long look at each one of them.”
Estus raised his eyebrows.
“So, you’re more than the Angel of Death,” he said. “I guess you tell us where we go next … I mean, what direction we go.”
Dearil chuckled.
“Not at all,” he said. “I have no control where you go next. In fact, I have no idea what happens after I leave here – it might be nothing, it might be everything – not my circus, not my monkeys. All I know is I’ll wind up at a hospital or an accident scene or in a war zone. And I’ll have the first conversation with someone who just passed away.
“As I said, I’m mostly just a counselor. And in your case, I needed to help you realize how much you mattered.”
And then all of a sudden, Dearil was gone. So was the hospital bed, the chair and Estus himself – at least his old body.
Instead, he found himself perched on the edge of the bed at an assisted living facility where his wife was being cared for.
He was dressed in all blue – her favorite color – and wearing a pair of black horn-rimmed glasses she used to make fun of during the early years of their marriage.
He was happy that she would see a familiar face after she slipped away … and even happier that he could tell her the world was a better place with her in it.
