Respecting the Memory.

It’s an odd thing, but my three periods of incarceration in the Royal Derby Hospital have started to seem like a distant memory. And you know what we do with distant memories, don’t you? We view them through a soft filter of rose-coloured gauze and imagine that they were nothing like as bad as they seemed at the time. And that’s irrational because however they seemed at the time was how they were at the time. Perception is, after all, the whole of the life experience. But memory is composed of such shifting sand that I wonder why we ever bother to rely on it.

I’ve also wondered what became of my dear old kidney. I don’t like to think of it as having been disposed of indecorously in an incinerator, or some dirty old receptacle near the back entrance where the big yellow wheelie bins were always queuing to be relieved of their unwholesome burdens. If I thought it had been fed to a stray dog I would be quite content, but I don’t suppose it was.

Maybe I should write to the hospital and ask, and maybe they will apprise me of the details in a respectful and sympathetic manner so that I might visit the spot and pay a level of respect commensurate with the dear old organ’s long and dutiful service. I don’t suppose they would do that either. It’s more likely that they would send a man in a white coat and a green van to collect me and deposit what’s left of my body in a place not too far from the missing kidney.