Lovey

Weight

The best things in life are the unexpected ones. That’s what my momma thought. But me? I’m on the fence about that one. I generally like to be prepared.

And that day, I felt on top of things. I felt ready; I felt like the pieces of life were finally falling back into place. I had graduated from rehab and was out of the nursing home. I could walk, praise the Lord. Dan and I were settling back into our routine, our regular nurses, our assisted living apartment that, while still new, was beginning to feel more like home. I was playing bridge again, seeing my friends.

Things seemed relatively ordinary. I had even managed to forget Annabelle’s outburst for a moment or two.

So maybe that’s why it didn’t happen like I thought it would. I expected some sort of emergency. Ambulance, EMT, defibrillator, extended hospital stay, devastation over pulling the plug . . . So, I guess the reason I didn’t cry right away is that I didn’t believe it. When I woke, stretched, listened to the birds chirping outside my window, thought of the delicious French vanilla creamer I had for my coffee, I expected it to be a normal day. Maybe I’d make bacon and eggs for breakfast. Kelly would be there to roll Dan down to lunch while I shuffled behind with the cane I had graduated to, thankful that the cumbersome walker was folded safely in my trunk for long walks and grocery store trips. I would play bridge in the afternoon while Luella sat with Dan, maybe read to him, maybe let him help her with the crossword if he was speaking that day. Then I would come home, have my scotch and we would sit together, probably with a few friends, have dinner, watch the news, and a nurse would put Dan to bed while I read for a while on the couch. That’s what I expected.

When I sat up and looked at Dan in his bed, my foot nearly touching him in the crowded room, I actually smiled because he looked so peaceful. I got up, taking my robe from the chair beside the bed, rubbed my tight hip just a little and tiptoed as best as one could with a cane so as not to wake my husband. Had a voice in my head not told me to turn back around, I probably would have had another hour or two of normalcy, another hour or two of life the same as it always had been. I would have been happily sipping my first cup of coffee of the morning, whisking the eggs, laying the bacon in the pan.

But I did turn back around, and, when I approached Dan’s bedside, I realized that, besides peaceful, he seemed very, very still. When I touched him, he was cold. Perhaps still not understanding what was happening or maybe in denial, I pulled the blanket up around him tighter, touching his chest, which was when I realized it wasn’t rising up and down. I put my finger to his neck. No pulse.

Then I sat down beside him in the little chair by his bed and took his hand in mine, staring at him, memorizing the lines of his face, his hairline, his bushy eyebrows.

I had pictured this day in my mind many, many times before. Who wouldn’t? In the scope of old age, when you realize that, in all likelihood, you are going to outlive the man you married, it is only practical to imagine how you might feel when he is gone from you. I had pictured hysteria and nausea, tears and screaming. But that supposed that he left me in a flurry of doctors, nurses and hospital workers, syringes and beeping screens.

It was so calm now, a sliver of light rising through the windows and onto his sleeping face. The first thing I did, right then and there, was thank God. Because I was eighty-seven years old, and He had given me the two things I had prayed for most fervently over the last few years. I had outlived my Dan, and it seemed terribly likely that all five of my girls would outlive me. As I exhaled, a tremendous weight lifted off of my shoulders.

And then I screamed like I would never stop. Screamed with the remembrance that this wasn’t Dan’s sleeping hand I was holding; it was his dead one. Screamed so loud that four nurses came charging into my apartment, as well they should have.

I’m sure they tried to console me and comfort me, hug me and soothe me. But nothing was going to make this better. My entire life had revolved around this man, and now, just as quickly as he had appeared in the school line beside me nearly eighty years before, he was gone.