“Death Bed, 2013” An excerpt from What Happened to Icarus: Encountering the Unfathomable in a World in Crisis (Wayfarer Books, March 2026)
We are talking about sports when the doorbell rings. My brother’s wife gets it. She always gets it.
“We’ve got a bed here,” says the man at the door.
“Oh,” she says, “we thought you were coming at six. They told us six.”
“Six? Wonder why they said that?” The man pauses, kindly, to allow for the woman in front of him to recognize that he understands the significance of the bed. He’s done this before. “Sorry about the mix up, but, well, we’ve got the bed. Can we come in?”
“Yes, yes. Of course.”
We have to stop talking about sports. The bed and all it represents has insinuated itself.
The two men carry parts and explain things about the bed, its assembly and operation, to anyone who will listen. They make an uncomfortable amount of eye contact with me while my brother, dying and emaciated, waits. They put it together in front of us, as my brother seems to be falling apart, held together with blankets, tubes and drugs.
“Can we put it right here?” they ask, still looking at me. It will be in front of the TV, in front of the football game we’d been discussing. I—the only one in the room who did not live there, who was not clearly dying or married to a dying man—say nothing. “That’s fine,” says my brother’s wife.
Bed between TV and us, there is now only the subject of death. Its various humiliations become the topic of discussion. The only topic possible. They begin to explain the bed’s attributes to my brother and me. I try to not to look rudely indifferent while conveying that my brother should be the one to whom they are speaking, He’s not gone yet. I want to say. He still exists and still can control a fucking bed. But they continue to explain it all to me. Finally they come to the rails on the side. I remember the bed my brother had as a child, after he’d outgrown his crib but there was still concern he’d fall out in his sleep. These railings can be adjusted, the man explains, through some process I don’t follow.
“Can we just take them off?” says my brother. He wants to say, but cannot, that he is not going to roll out of his bed. He is a dying man, not a child.
“Yeah, sure,” says the man. He is not unkind. He must hate coming into this kind of home, I think, the kind where the dying man is young and the pitter-patter of his children’s feet rather than the dull drone of the home shopping network provide the background for his work. I feel a moment of compassion and admiration for his job: The Deliverer of Deathbeds.
Mercifully, he leaves. My brother’s youngest son comes in and looks uncomprehendingly at the bed. “What’s this?” he asks.
“It’s a new bed for daddy,” says my brother with a smile. “It will help me sleep better. So my back won’t hurt.” The euphemisms, so long practiced, slide off his tongue so easily that they—unburdened with the agony of the truth—have become themselves something like truth, true in the strange bubble that has become their home, the home of a dying man.
“Why is it here?” he asks. Four-year-olds are more honest. More direct.
“We should move it,” says my brother. “It’s really in the way.”
And the little boy nods, walking thoughtfully away.
Theodore Richards is an educator, poet, and philosopher, and the founder of The Chicago Wisdom Project. His work is dedicated to re-imagining education and creating new narratives about our place in the world. He has received degrees from various institutions, including the University of Chicago and The California Institute of Integral Studies, but has learned just as much studying the martial art of Bagua; teaching in various settings and students; and as a traveler from the Far East to the Middle East, from southern Africa to the South Pacific. He is the author of eight books and numerous literary awards, including two Nautilus Book Awards and three Independent Publisher Awards. He lives on the south side of Chicago with his wife and three daughters.