Nine floors up

At the Royal Free Hospital in London, looking northeast towards Parliament Hill Fields and Hampstead Heath. 
Hardly a magic casement and yet only a stone's throw from Keats' House, where the poet wooed Fanny Brawne and wrote  Ode to a Nightingale.

I'm here visiting The Old Man who was admitted after a fall two weeks ago. He's been getting increasingly frail and confused and in spite of extra help has not been managing the independent existence that is his choice. His future is in the balance now and difficult decisions will have to be made if he can't get back home.

To cease upon the midnight with no pain would surely be the sort of exit most of us would wish for when life draws to a close but so far that option is denied us in the UK. For many of us the alternative has to be a slow demise...


"The weariness, the fever, and the fret
 Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
 Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last grey hairs,
  Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
 Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
  And leaden-eyed despairs."

-----------------------------------------------

(Nightingales are long gone from the Heath, their place taken by the screeching calls of raucous green parakeets that no one would welcome as an accompaniment to rest, eternal or otherwise.)