Goines On: His last thought

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With the morning’s snow came a sense of foreboding. Was it a premonition? Goines couldn’t reliably say he had ever had a premonition – that he could remember anyway – a sense of disaster that came to pass. What did a premonition feel like? And did he even want to know that his sense of foreboding was a premonition? Wasn’t it better just to be afraid? Surely the feeling would pass; the disaster might not.
    Taking out the bird feeders, Goines almost slid and fell on the Goineses’ snow-covered northwest patio. Each hand held a feeder, so he gingerly shuffled his feet to the lawn before walking more safely to the stanchions.
    Coming back from having supplied the birds, to try to keep from falling, he gripped as well as he could the porch’s columns. He’d just been telling the radiography technician at the hospital on Tuesday about his fall in January 1996’s blizzard that landed him on his butt with a jar that jolted his spine all the way into his mid-brain. He told the technician about the neurosurgeon’s saying later – after excising Goines’ tumor, inserting the T-shaped section of his skull back in place, and sewing up his scalp – that if the tumor had grown much larger, a fall like that would probably have killed him instantly. What would Goines’ last thought have been that January?
    What might it have been this January? Goines had held onto those porch columns precisely because he did not want to have his very last thought. He wanted to go on – and on – having thoughts.
    Like his thought just last night, after reading the humor article “Pardon the Palindromes (Please)” in the New Yorker: whether anyone had ever written a grammatically correct palindrome sentence composed of three or five (or more!) palindrome words? E.g., x-y-x, or x-y-z-y-x. He could start by googling “words that are palindromes” to see whether he could obtain a lexicon to work with. If he could construct such a palindrome, it would combine the features of a palindrome with words as units with those of a palindrome with letters as units. Goines admired such examples of the former as this, “So patient a nurse to nurse a patient so,” and this, “Is it crazy how saying sentences backwards creates backwards sentences saying how crazy it is?”
    And he hadn’t yet written that light verse he wanted to write about

occasional urinary incontinence,
accelerating mental incompetence,
troubled nights of insomnolence,
a growing lack of confidence in consequence—

    No, Goines didn’t want to have his very last thought yet, even though he knew that someday he would, and believed that there would be no thoughts after it.

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