Cezanne ward at three on clock in the morning is like a separate world. An Other World. And I am the alien in it. As I rush in through the closed, rubber edged double doors I hit a wall of tired, heavy air. The doors, which I had opened with such force, hiss and suck themselves closed behind me. Enclosing me, trapping me in this other world. The panic of the middle of the night phone call, the hasty throwing on of clothes, the lunatic drive to the hospital, even the gut wrenching sobs are all sealed outside those closed doors. I look back filled with a longing I won't name.
 
The corridor stretches ahead of me like an exercise in perspective. The air is hospital warm and dire-dread cold at the same time. I feel the need to breathe shallowly in order to survive in this thin, uncertain atmosphere. I focus on the point where the walls of the corridor meet in the distance and begin to move towards the room. My head turns from side to side, taking in for the last time the burnt orange hues of the prints on the walls, one exactly midway between each room,
Still life with a Compotier, Still life with apples and oranges, Still life with a peppermint bottle, Still life with Basket
Onwards they march to the vanishing point.
 

I remember two short months ago when he came here, how we had moved slowly along, sliding the oxygen tank behind easily across the highly polished floor, stopping at each picture, naming it, examining it, finding details to share in it. Down one side and back up the other, sometimes twice a day. Making sure his muscles stayed functional. Later we had shuffled the journey, later still I had wheeled him, then he stopped leaving his room. But we remembered the pictures, and to pass the time I had bought him a book of Cezanne's life and work to keep him in touch with those images outside his four walls. Making him push his barriers even further we had planned how we would view them in the flesh, after, after, after.

We had noted things Cezanne had said. Written large some of his more bombastic words, and those said about him. I pictured them now.
Zola had said
"I have great hopes for him."
This was sellotaped on the right hand side of his table.
Pisarro commented that,
‘He would astonish those too quick to condemn him.'
This was sellotaped on the left of his table.
And, the best of all, Cezanne himself had said,
"I begin to feel stronger than everyone around me."
This was a large A3 felt tip penned poster on the wall beside him, at eye level.
 
We had chuckled over the choice of prints on the corridor walls - or at least at those they chose not to display - Still Life with a commode, Still life with a skull - or even more dire, a Pyramid of skulls. We had decided that they had lost their sense of humour. We hung fuzzy, internet downloaded desktop printed versions of them in his room. Three weeks they had stayed there. The commode one came down first, we replaced it with water melons and pomeg
ranates. The skulls came down two weeks later. We didn't replace them.

We had laughed. The echo of that laugh drew me the last few steps the picture before his door. Still life with a cherub.   I stared at it. He had spoken to it each time he passed it. ‘Quite armless,' he had quipped at first, to be replaced with a wistful ‘Cheeky cherub,' later on. Later still he had murmured,
Still life, there is still life!'
I put my finger to its face. It was quite indifferent. It had no memories, no favourites, it was, after all, just a picture of a cherub, and a plaster one at that. Just another step in an artist's search to blend light and matter.
 
In a rush I remember. I am swamped by what we had chosen to ignore about Cezanne in those long, long weeks of fading hope. He had been an unpleasant, often aggressive man. One who refused to acknowledge his child or marry the child's mother, one who ended his life as a hermit. An embittered old man, he had collapsed painting in the fields and whose near lifeless body had been carried home on a laundry cart. One whose work, in his lifetime, had been ridiculed.
 
I sway where I stand. I can't enter the room feeling this angry, this depressed. I will not contaminate the atmosphere with such emotions. I turn away looking back the way I have come, striving for, at best, a sort of equilibrium. Still life, still life, still...the thought will be acknowledged. It insists. Still. Life. Although he has been receding from the world, day by day. Although I have heard no words, I have watched his eyes move beneath their lids, paper thin traced with fine, deep purple threads where blood still flows. Still life. Watched the lashes flicker on the transparent cheek, lashes grown, again full and dark and beautiful. Still life. Heard the softest sigh of his resting breath. Touched my lips with butterfly gentleness on the warmth of his soft pink mouth. Still life.
 
Supported with these mind-pictures, I open the door. Dawn is tiptoeing in through the un-curtained window. Silver strands of light inch across the floor and, as I watch begin to climb across the sheet towards his face. I sit. I raise my eyes to his and find that they are open. The corners of his mouth raise. He smiles his smile.
"Everyone is waiting. I can see them all." His eyes flicker, then close.
Later, he says. At least I think he says,
"There is still life."
Maybe we just share the thought.
There is still life.