Ashes for a Boy

I visited a young man on the ICU, 23 years old,
to offer ashes yesterday.
His mother, teary yet unwilling to talk to me,
Nonetheless agreed for me to give her little boy with cancer this mark of his mortality.
The young man could understand but could make no reply.
I approached him and explained what I would do,
and when I touched his brow with the dusty blackness of death,
tears fell from his eyes.
It occurred to me how little I understood of him and his pain, or his mother's;
indeed how little we know of anyone.
And yet we are all here together bound up in this mortal cloak,
hoping to one day be wrapped again in life.