``He's only six years old,'' the nurse said, ``he doesn't need to learn to swear.''
``I don't even want to!'' the boy said.
His mother just laughed and picked up a teddy bear and pretended to attack him then she had to get the bus home. She sat by a window and watched the city go by her. So many children who weren't sick. Children who would grow to be old and see the wonders of a new century. Children whose mothers didn't even stop to think how lucky they were.
The swearing thing was strange. Just one day it became very important to her that he should swear like a man, that he should experience this little part of manhood before he died. There was so little she could hope for him.
``Don't spoil his last days, you trouble him,'' the nurse had said.
She knew the nurse was right. She would no longer recite the words that she wanted him to say.
Beaten again, even in this small thing.
The next day she saw things were not going well. She sang him songs barely remembered from her childhood.
She told him stories of her father's long struggle to raise a motherless family. Stories told so many times that they felt like old soft blankets enveloping him. He slept.
The night shift nurse did not know the boy. She was an agency nurse and she feared sick children. She sat at the nursing station and watched the monitors and checked the morning orders and tried to familiarize herself with yet another computer system.
Sometime in the night she heard the soft voice and she went to investigate and she heard a litany of curses chaining on through the night. She stood in the doorway and listened for a while then she went back to her desk. She brought up the boy's chart on the terminal and tried to make a comment ``swearing continuously,'' but she failed to hit enter that one last time.
The comment disappeared.