Goines On: The young doctor

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The first words Goines said to himself as he lay in bed this morning were, “I am going to die.” They felt truer than usual, more forthright, more definitive, as though he had merely mouthed them before, saying someone else’s words, quoting them, as when he reported what that doctor who wrote books said, “We are all going to die of something.”
    He had quoted that same doctor just yesterday to that intense, dark, young Israeli doctor he had the appointment with for his bone density. They had been talking about his scoliosis, his thoracic stress fractures, and she said there were tests they might do to see whether anything could be done. Goines’ first thought had been, he didn’t need that, he would die of something else first, too soon for it to be worth the bother. And he had said as much to her, and quoted her faculty colleague who had written books about the mortality rate’s being precisely one per person.
    The young doctor had looked particularly somber when their consultation ended. Goines wondered now whether she had known something about him that she wasn’t telling him. Or was it because she had been reminded of her own mortality? He hoped, for her sake, it had been his death she was thinking of and not her own.
    His next thought this morning was of Jesus, of the Jesus who might actually have risen from the dead. And, perhaps for the first time, Goines saw that the possibility it was true that Jesus had risen from the dead was a powerful incentive for a person to believe it, if it meant that, even though he was going to die, he, too, might arise and live. Perhaps forever, if not to die again and again, and maybe forget each time that death awaited and have to sweat in anticipation of it.
    Probably what Goines had found objectionable as a teenager, that Sunday he had sat in that First Baptist Church pew and refused the communion “wine,” was the baggage that went along with the Christian doctrine: you had to believe it in order for it to work for you. That, Goines had found unacceptable. And he hoped he had the courage still to find it so.
    But the fact that he had immediately thought of Jesus this morning, after speaking plainly to himself that he was going to die, made him uneasy. Goines was going to have be on the lookout for other chinks in his…armor?

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