Last Piece written for Writing Love and Loss

We had our last Writing Love and Loss class tonight.  I missed last week because of google calendar user error.  I wrote this for tonight.

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December 16, 2021

As we were waiting for the funeral home to carry my husband’s body away, I talked about oral sex. 

In what I assume now were slightly hysterical tones, I talked about how we got together in 1971 when I was barely 18 and he was 41.  How I’d followed him home after my Aunt Huldah’s birthday party, a late-into-the-night gab feast where a reefer was passed around my grandfather’s great, round, oak table. I told the hospice nurse and my friend Stacey the story of how I had seduced the skinny, bearded English professor. I reveled in having experienced such a non-traditional beginning for a marriage of almost five decades.

I called our for-profit hospice early that Boxing Day after waking and finding him in the same position in the hospital bed that he’d held since the terrible morning before. His temperature was 105 and he was unconscious.  I called the hospice but no one could get to me until 3 pm.  When the nurse arrived she almost immediately “called it,” as they say on medical TV.

I had thought I would want to clean him, as I had the old fellow who had been my hospice client back in the 90s.  That gentlemen, who was almost as skinny at his death as Will became, was my “client” (I was a volunteer) for almost 6 months.  As he was dying of lung cancer, he was also teaching me to play the guitar. He left the earth with far more of himself than my sweetheart.  Sadly, I wasn’t able to be at his death. I got the call that his dying was active right before I was to give a test at the college where I worked. I felt a responsibility to the school and my students and so missed my client’s actual death.  But when I finally arrived at his home, I was able to help the hospice nurse clean his body.  I had imagined at the time that I might do the same for my older husband some day.

But the day in 2021 when Will died, the nurse wasn’t focused on cleaning him.  She just did her job then waited with my friend and me as I babbled.   I was exhausted and giddy with relief. For the seven years I lived with his dementia I knew it would end in death. My goal had been to postpone the end as long as possible – until it wasn’t.  Until his 6 foot frame reduced to 112 pounds and he was eating only lemon drops and protein juice.

At the end, his life force was so strong that his body held on past its time.  The Hospice chaplain and I had spent hours the previous week, the week Will entered the hospital bed, telling him about the glories of the “other side.” Pastor Noah spoke mostly about the joy of being with Jesus.  I told my old sweetheart he would meet up with the cat and dog he had loved, June Jumpha and Princess Birdy.

 And then he was dead. At last the long struggle was over. I imagined in that moment that I would soon dive into dating, find a man or woman friend with benefits and become a Merry Widow.  For some reason, because I’d experienced pretty severe grief for the final four of the dementia years, I thought I’d be freed.  

Instead, my heart and mind became a scene of devastation.  I hadn’t understood that in spite of our life as friends, as private people, as psychologically separate individuals, being with him for fifty years was my foundation. He made it possible for me to live with my melancholia and manias without flying into madness. His were the eyes and arms that told me, no matter how great my sin, I would always be loved.

I have not felt at home in the world since he left it.