O, Call Back Yesterday, Bid Time Return!

Ozymandias

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Hands slowly but relentlessly chase each other across a clock's face; pages from a calendar detach one by one and yellow on the faded carpet; soft dust covers the smooth obsidian shelves in a forgotten room. Time, the efficient destroyer of empires, not only topples monuments to ancient kings.

It withers the cancer patient like a fallen stag rotting among dead branches, deep in the forest.

I walked into a patient's room recently and saw lying there a former scientist, a man known for his precision and diligence in all aspects of life, a lover of Popular Mechanics, and of a good steak.

He twitched about in his bed, grasping at the air, moaning, staring at the nothingness that caressed his skeletal face. For a moment I thought I saw Death beside him, saw him floating inside his eyes, smelled him crouching over the wrinkled sheets.

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies...

The cancer raging throughout my patient seemed to be consuming him from within, like a hidden fire demolishing a silent building. As I despaired over him I thought once again of those sad lines from Shelley:

'My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'

Time and cancer make a deadly combination. Just as the sun bakes a towering statue for thousands of years until it breaks apart and crashes into the desert, so does time steal away the breath of the patient until, like Ramses II, all that remains of his glorious reign are brittle bones, "the decay / Of that colossal wreck."

[Author's Note: The title of this post is from a line spoken by the Earl of Salisbury, Act III, Scene II, Richard II, by you-know-who]