Epitasis (e-pit’-a-sis): The addition of a concluding sentence that merely emphasizes what has already been stated. A kind of amplification. [The opposite of anesis.]
Time was pushing. It was running into the future. It was consuming the present. Time was making me older. Time was pushing—pushing hard.
I hated it. Now that I was almost 80, I really hated it. My peers are dying. Mostly gruesomely. Mostly from cancer. Bald from chemo, spaced out on pain pills, bristling with tubes, gaunt, jaundiced, and hollow-eyed, like they’re undergoing daily torture, laying there quietly awaiting the removal of an organ or two, and then dying.
And here I am. A robust old man. I hike, I swim, I ride my motorcycle, I play Corn Hole, I mow the lawn, I work in my garden. I go hiking. I have sex with my wife. I eat ice cream. I smoke cigars. The list goes on and on. My doctor tells me it’s good genes that enable me to blast through death, into the the waiting future.
Today, my friend Bill called me. He was crying. He had just been diagnosed with bladder cancer. His doctor has given him 2 months to live.
I was getting really tired of the “Hello. I’m dying” phone calls. I was getting tired of trying to console people who couldn’t be consoled. I lost it. I asked Bill why the hell he called me to tell me he’s dying. He told me he didn’t know—he was calling everybody. I told him to take me off his fu*king list and tell his wife not to get in touch when he died. I immediately felt better. I hung up. Not a shred of guilt.
Then my cellphone rang. It was Eddie calling. He was crying and told me he had been diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. At best, he had one week to live. I hung up without saying goodbye. I felt good. Free of another burden!
I lit a cigar and looked up the stars. “Time will tell” I thought to myself. It’s all about time crushing some people and caressing others. Eddie and Bill were going to die of cancer, just like everybody else I knew. I was going to live. I finished my cigar and went inside and had sex with my wife. It was good. It never gets old.
Definitions courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu).
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