Lovey

The Light

My momma always told me that honesty was the most important thing in life. But I’ve never understood why people are so hell-bent on honesty. It’s not the truth that sets you free. The truth is the thing that destroys lives, that shatters the mirror. The truth is selfish and shameful, and better kept to oneself. In fact, I’m quite sure that the only things that paper-clip any of our lives together are the white lies. They are the defibrillators that bring us back when we were on the brink of succumbing to the light.

As I lie in my four-poster mahogany bed with the giant canopy, the one I made love to my husband in for decades, I raise myself onto my elbows and study his features across the room as the moonbeams stream through the crack in the curtains, pouring into the open, snoring mouth, revealing the secret that the teeth seen in the daylight are only another ruse, that time has taken yet another one of my husband’s rights; the confinement to the hospital bed is not the only indignity.

He startles awake and, as so often happens in the middle of the night, turns his head from side to side, almost frantically, searching for me, the one who has been beside him since he was scarcely more than a boy. It is a clear reminder that, though I have always perceived myself as completely dependent on him, the leaning goes both ways. “Lovey,” he says, in his almost devastatingly lucid middle-of-the-night voice.

“Yes, my darling.”

“Can I get you anything?”

I smile the heartbreaking smile of a master who knows she should put the dog down, allow it some peace. But the bile soars at the thought of him being gone from me, and I steel myself once again. “Not a thing, sweetheart. Are you all right?”

“As long as you’re here, I’m perfect.”

As he settles back down to sleep, to the snoring that is my morning rainfall, I remember the last time he whispered that in my ear, only days before the stroke, as we danced slow and close in the kitchen after a nightcap on the patio.

Short-term memories, I remind myself, not letting my mind wander back to those early years together, to the days we met, to the nights I knew I’d found my true love. Living in the past, I’ve always thought, is a sign of dementia. Slipping into those old memories, dwelling on the “what was” instead of the “what could be” means that it’s almost over. And so I will myself to stay in the here and now, though it becomes harder and harder.

Tomorrow, I remind myself, we have an appointment with that new neurologist. He’ll have some answers. He’ll have a cure.

And as I relax back into a pile of down pillows, the thought, though I have willed it not to, crosses my mind: The lies that matter most are the ones we tell ourselves.