Who, Then, Am I?

I have almost no command over this body anymore.

My eyes have forgotten how to see.
My ears have forgotten how to hear.
My feet tremble beneath me,
and the soles of my feet
can no longer read the language of the earth.

My kidneys have gone on a permanent strike.
My lungs have grown weary and lazy.
My liver is waiting in the wings,
perhaps preparing to join the rebellion.

And yet—

my heart keeps beating.

Faithfully.
Mystically.
Without asking me
whether I want it to.

At sixty-one,
I discovered something
I had somehow never known:

I am not this body.

I don't know how I know this.
I really don't.

I only know that
when the body began to abandon me,
something in me
did not leave.

Something watched.

Something wondered.

Something remained.

And then, almost as strangely,
I discovered that I am not the mind either.

For even the mind—
with all its memories, fears, arguments,
desires, disappointments and dreams—
can be watched.

And if I can watch the mind,
how can I be the mind?

So who am I?

I don't know.

I really, really don't know.

What I do know is that
I can still place one word beside another,
still coax a sentence into existence,
still worry about subject-verb agreement
when almost everything else
has stopped agreeing with me.

There is something wonderfully absurd about that.

The body is failing.
The mind is restless.
The organs are staging their revolts.

And somewhere in the middle of it all,
a sentence survives.

Perhaps that is the joke.
Perhaps that is the mystery.

We spend a lifetime saying,
“This is my body.”
“This is my mind.”
“My thoughts.”
“My memories.”
“My life.”

And then, one day,
life quietly asks:

If all these things are yours,
who is the ‘you’ that owns them?

At sixty-one,
I have no answer.

Only a strange stillness.

Only a question
that has grown larger than the one who asks it.

Only this beating heart.

Only this awareness.

Only this inexplicable
I am.

And for now—

perhaps that is enough.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.