THE END - part one

That was it then. Betsy was gone.

Her body was still warm. I tested the heat of her flesh and my finger made a dent, the same way it would have a few short minutes ago. She didn’t move, though, and she couldn’t talk anymore, but I couldn’t be sure that the voice she listened to inside her head wasn’t still talking to her.

I read once about a French nobleman who, on his way to the guillotine, said that after his head was cut off, he would blink for as long as he could if he was able to. Reportedly, he blinked for almost thirty seconds.

Thirty seconds had probably gone by since she stopped breathing. It seemed reasnable to believe that the voice wasn’t talking to her anymore.

I hadn’t slept well since she went into hospice a week ago. Hadn’t really slept at all the last couple of days.

I’m seventy-five years old, and I had never seen a person actually die before. There wasn’t much drama. She just slowed down and finally stopped. It was pretty easy … for her.

The hospice lady patted my shoulder and said, “You take all the time you need, honey.” She went into the kitchen, and after some rattling around, the coffee maker started sputtering.

I cried with my head in my hands until my stomach hurt and my tears ran dry. My breath came in quick jerks for a while. Finally, it settled down. Every once in a while, I’d sneak a peek at Betsy’s body, and then cry again. Eventually, my body quit responding. Worry crept into the room with us. What would I do now? How did the washing machine work? Who would touch me now? Would anyone ever hold me in their arms again?

I sobbed a few times, then I got bored. The whole dying process had been stupidly boring. A lot of waiting. The way I’m built, I need to keep busy or I go crazy,but right now, I had to sit in here with her body for a respectable period of time. I thought about going and getting my drawing pad. I was never going to get a model who would hold still better. Would that be okay? Betsy wouldn’t mind. Art was one of the things that held our marriage together. I didn’t want to scandalize the hospice lady, though, so I figured it probably wouldn’t be the best thing.

Still, I needed something to do, so I took her hands in both of mine and closed my eyes.

My promise to her that I would call our son as soon as she passed sat on me, crushing the breath from my chest. I didn’t wanna do it. I know that’s why she made me promise. She knew if I didn’t do it right away, I’d put it off and a week would go by, and then a month, and then a year, and then it would be too late.

I still didn’t want to do it. Oscar already hated me. Now he was going to associate me with his mother‘s death. Probably blame me. I decided to rest for a few minutes before I called him.

The next thing that popped into my head wasn’t a memory of reality at all; it was a story I used to tell when people asked how we got together. I always told everyone we met in a grocery store in Milan. That I came around the corner of the aisle, and she was holding a jar of gherkin pickles. Large. Spicy. When she saw me, we made eye contact, and as though a conductor had raised a baton, we both rose erect, stopped breathing, and simultaneously, I looked at her breasts and she looked at my crotch.

The lighting must have been flattering. She dropped the gherkin pickles. The glass shattered at her feet. Pickles and juice went everywhere.

We both looked down at the disaster, then up into each other’s startled eyes.

I put my finger to my lips in the universal symbol for quiet, and reached for her. She came to me, and we slipped around the corner of the aisle, and out into the hot summer night.

That was the story I told people about how we met, but it wasn’t the truth. It was just a joke between us. It was a stupid thing to think about as I sat there with my hand on top of hers, my arm resting on the hospital bed, and my forehead bowed.

I had a better memory next. It was the time she saved a little girl from being run over by a motorcycle in Mexico. Really, all she did was scream at the clueless motorcycle rider who was powering up the hill when the tiny girl darted away from her father and directly into the path of the front motorcycle tire, which was about her size, but would’ve won the fight easily. The scream surprised the motorcycle rider, who instinctively hit his brakes and veered to the right, running over Betsy’s great and second toes and breaking them both in two places. The little girl dashed safely in front of the motorcycle. The father, from whom she had escaped, calmly crossed the street behind the motorcycle and called to his daughter as he headed up a side alley. Nothing happened to the little girl, but I’m pretty sure if Betsy hadn’t screamed, something would have. She saved a life, but instead of getting credit for it, she got two crushed toes.

Anyway, those were the digressions of my internal monologue after I closed my eyes and as I drifted through the past, while both my hands cradled hers.

Then my knee itched, so I scratched it.

The coffee was starting to smell good. I was so tired.

I cheated and opened my eyes and looked at her again. She was lying on her back with her hands on her stomach. All the folds and bags in her face and throat drooped toward the center of the Earth. The brow line, nose, and muzzle of the mouth projected above the sagging flesh like mountain peaks poking out of rolling foothills. They looked strong and sharp, almost youthful, much as they had appeared when I first met her as a little girl.

I was eight or nine, and walking my dog, Barkley, with my mother, when she came right up to us.

I considered it beneath my dignity to notice girls, but secretly they made me very uncomfortable.

My mother, for her part, had no idea that this was the person who would nurse her through the last two years of her life.

Our dog was a mutt. We got her at the pound. She was half Border Collie and half Chihuahua. I loved her a lot, but my mom did most of the actual taking care of the needy animal.

So Betsy came right up to us, actually, she came right up to Barkley, got down on one knee, and started scratching him behind the ear. Barkley opened his mouth, stuck his tongue out, and hung his head to give her better access.

Mom and I just stood there and watched. After an interval of scratching, she said, “All right, Dogger, gotta go. You be good.” And she got up and skipped away. Never talked to us. I certainly didn’t talk to her. I was scared of her. She was too cute.

I wouldn’t actually talk to her until we were both in the seventh grade.

Betsy’s hands were starting to get cold, not freezing, but no longer warm. I let go of them and sat up straight.

A piece of lint on the floor caught my attention. It was probably some fluff off one of the sweaters she was always wearing near the end. Her body quit making heat. The lint was dancing in some kind of breeze. When I focused on it, the room went out of focus. I closed one eye and then the other, but nothing worked, so I lost interest in it.

For a period of time, I didn’t really have any thoughts. It’s unusual for my internal monologue to shut down. I guess the little voice in there was as exhausted as I was.

Then I thought of coffee again.

I got up and went into the kitchen. The hospice lady handed me a cup of coffee, and I sat down at the table.

Everything looked the same, yet different. There was to be no more normal for me … not for a while.

I closed my eyes and rested.

The hospice lady sat down opposite me with her own cup of coffee. “There are some calls that have to be made. Do you want me to do that for you?”

It was a dumb question, but she probably had to ask it for legal reasons. That was the pond we had jumped into legal stuff: a body to deal with, an estate to chop up, bills, death certificates. This was a job for her. She had a checklist to go through.

I looked at her, and she wobbled. It was probably just the steam from the coffee.

The hospice lady talked at me for a while. I tried to listen. I nodded and sipped my coffee. Eventually, she went into the other room and started packing up tubes and pieces of equipment. She was always in the other room, rattling around. Pretty soon, there wouldn’t be anyone rattling around in the other room. It was going to get uncomfortably quiet.

I put my cup in the sink, and suddenly I was in the bathroom. I must have walked there. It didn’t matter.

I sat on the toilet and peed. It takes me a while. I haven’t won a peeing race in thirty years.

Three months before I turned sixty-five, and Medicare would have taken care of it, I woke up one day and couldn’t pee anymore. The stream had been a trickle for a while, but now the sphincter was jammed shut. I tried to pee fifty times that first day and squirted out three drops total. It was starting to get uncomfortable in my gut. I didn’t seek medical attention, though. I didn’t want to spend the money. I had just had a kidney stone episode a couple of months before, and it cost me $3000 to go to the emergency room and get a prescription for some opioids.

On the third day of urine retention, I broke down and went to the emergency room. An angel inserted a catheter into me, and I squirted out a liter of pee.

Unfortunately, urine immediately started building up again, and I had to pay for a return visit to the ER that evening. They taught me how to catheterize myself. It’s not as terrible as it sounds.

So the doc put me on Tamsulosin and Finastride, which shrank my prostate, and within a few days, I was peeing again.

Like I said, I won’t win any races, but I’m not in a hurry now either. Also, the drugs make my hair and beard grow out better than they ever have before in my life. They’re both still gray, but heck, most dudes my age are bald.

When I was done peeing, I stood up. The shower was right there. I probably needed one.

I dropped my clothes in a puddle on the floor, turned on the water all the way to the left, stuck my hand in, and waited.

The next few days would be filled with waiting. When you’re dealing with the dead, what’s the hurry? Everybody is worried about seeming unseemly. There’s a decorum. Betsy never gave a fuck about decorum. Of course, making a fuss isn’t going to help either. The easiest way to get through something like this is just to go along.

The hot water made it through the pipes, and I got it adjusted correctly. I like it as hot as I can stand.

I got in the shower, raised both arms, and got my pits wet, then turned around and drenched myself from the top down. I dumped some shampoo on my head and worked up a good lather, then grabbed a couple of handfuls of soap bubbles and rubbed them on my pits, my crotch, and my ass. Then I rinsed from the top down. It took about a minute.

Normally, I’m done at that point, and I shut the water off and get out. Today, I leaned into the force of the water, bowed my head, and let it pound the sound from my skull.

After a while, the hot water ran out.

I didn’t want to put the dirty clothes back on, and I hadn’t brought in a fresh set with me. To get to the bedroom required a quick dash down the hallway, really only a few feet. It wasn’t usually a problem, but today, I didn’t want the hospice lady to catch me with no clothes on.

It doesn’t bother me for people to see me naked. I rather like it on most occasions. I think it’s wrong that in our culture, we’ve been taught to be ashamed of so many of the aspects of who we are. I didn’t want to make things uncomfortable for the hospice lady, though.

I opened the door and peeked. She sat at the kitchen table, staring out the window and drinking more coffee.

I probably could’ve made the dash with a towel wrapped around me, but I put my old clothes back on anyway, walked the five feet to the bedroom, closed the door, and took the clothes back off.

I stood there naked and realized how icky my skin felt. The nervous sweat of confronting death had been absorbed by my clothes and rubbed back off on me after my shower.

The only proper thing to do was put the clothes back on, gather up the necessary items, go back into the bathroom, take the clothes off, and take another shower.

Then I had to pee again.

The hospice lady was standing when I finally got back to the kitchen. She said some sympathy stuff, gave me a stack of literature, and a list of phone numbers. She told me someone was coming to get “the body” in a couple of hours, then she gathered up the rest of her stuff and went out the front door.

I shut it behind her and pushed the wooden slab until it clicked. The refrigerator was humming and gently rocking on three legs. I hoped the compressor wasn’t getting ready to go out. That’s what kills refrigerators … compressor failure. The furnace kicked on. The floor squeaked. It wasn’t as quiet as I thought it was going to be.

There was nothing to look at in front of me but the door. It got boring, so I reluctantly turned around. Betsy’s body was lying on the hospital bed that had been set up in the living room just two days ago. The hospice lady must have arranged her. She looked comfortable. The sheets were pulled up under her elbows and folded flat.

I started walking over toward her, but it seemed to be taking too long. I looked down at the floorboards. Maybe I could count them. How many floorboards could there be between us? They moved as I walked. I was getting dizzy, so I quit looking at them and saw something worse: Betsy’s body.

I pushed one of the wingback chairs over close to her, so I could reach her hand, and sat in it.

Betsy wasn’t wearing her glasses. I wondered where they were. They would be wherever she took them off for the last time. The last time. That seemed profound. It must be meaningful somehow. Never ever to happen again. The last time she woke up … not knowing it was the last time. The last time she put on her shoes. The last time she brushed her shining hair. The last time we kissed. The last time we made love.

I couldn’t swallow. A million butterflies rose in a cloud and flapped their way from my gut into my throat and up to my eyes. I cried and spasmed.

After that, I was quiet for a while. All the flapping wings had blown rational thought out of my brain. I was exhausted. I don’t think I slept, but after a while, I noticed it was getting light outside.

Breakfast seemed like a reasonable idea. I hadn’t really eaten anything in a couple of days.

There wasn’t a whole lot in the fridge, but Betsy always kept bacon and eggs around for me. I took three strips out, turned the heat on high to get the pan going, and tossed them in.

On the countertop, next to my hand, the small pile of literature left behind by the hospice lady caught my eye. I picked one up and looked at it, but I couldn’t read it. The writing was small and printed over a picture of a meadow with lambs. Everything swam together like Scrabble pieces being stirred before the game begins.

Bacon and eggs might not be enough. You sort of needed something to sop up the grease. I thought maybe I’d make some toast, but when I looked in the fridge, there was no bread.

That was a disappointment.

A beam of sunlight came in the kitchen window and landed on the countertop next to my hand. The light had that golden quality it only gets on the last glorious days of summer. The beautiful day beckoned to me. I thought I’d go for a walk to the convenience store at the bottom of the hill and get some bread.

The night before, as I sat with Betsy for the last time, a hard-driving rain rolled through and pounded the last of the leaves from the trees. Now, they plastered the sidewalk in front of me. As I walked, I studied their overlapping oranges and muted browns. The heat of the almost autumn sun teased the crown of my head through the net of tree limbs.

Something about my street was different from what I remembered. Smaller houses, maybe, and not many cars. Usually, cars filled all the on-street parking spaces. Maybe I had made a wrong turn.

I was worrying about a blister that was forming on the heel of my right foot, when a dog that looked just like the one I had when I was a kid, ran right by me, bumping into my leg and knocking me back a step.

“Barkley?” I exclaimed.

Click here to read part 2