Death came for her slowly. Months of agonizing sickness, and then six weeks of being too weak to even sit up in bed without help, her daughter coming to visit her for two hours every day, even though by the end they both knew that she’d rather be doing anything else. Both waiting impatiently for the inevitable, when Mother would rest her eyes for a final night’s sleep, and, God willing, pass over painlessly.
Her poor daughter was no stranger to bereavement. The poor girl had witnessed her father go out the same way, bound by invisible chains to a hospital bed, six years prior. Poor girl. She was going to be forty-five next week. Forty-five, with a husband and three kids who were spared the horror of seeing their grandmother in her ugly dying days. They were still children, Abigail had said. They didn’t need to see death in all of its ugliness yet. It sufficed to know that their grandmother had gone away, somewhere better, peacefully. They didn’t need to know how pathetic it actually looked. Didn’t need to see her being spoon-fed applesauce by an underpaid nurse aide looking forward to her fifteen-minute scheduled lunch break. Didn’t need to hear the awkward small talk of a mother and daughter who had run out of new things to say to one another a month ago, and had thought their time would have been cut short well before now.
Bill’s death had been different. His illness had come on suddenly—an unexpected heart attack, followed by five days of bed rest and then another one, fatal this time. She had stayed by his side the entire time. Slept sitting upright in the stiff pink hospital chair. It was the most quality time that they’d had together since they were in their twenties. The doctors remained optimistic, but Bill knew he was dying. He said he could feel it. She thought that was ridiculous. How could he say that he was going to die in a couple of days, when the doctors had seen nothing but improvement in his EKGs and lab tests?
She knew what he had meant now. She felt Death waiting for her now, and wondered what was taking him so long. Was he waiting for some unfinished business to be settled? Maybe for some parting message from her to Abby, some closure?
She remembered her final conversation with Bill. “I’ll see you in the next life. I’ll wait for you.” This was something they had said to one another always, even when their marriage was still young. “We’ll find each other. This life is just the beginning.” She knew that he said this to reassure her more than himself. She had always been terrified of the concept of death, of ceasing to exist, of running out of moments. She wondered if his constant reassurances were actual promises or merely kind lies that he told her to ease the constant anxiety and pain she felt just from being alive. She was exposed to the horrors of death early, he must have said to himself when she was growing too needy to bear. Be easy on her. Just breathing was terrifying, when she knew that one day the breaths would stop.
They weren’t wealthy people. They worked hard in their lives, made sacrifices for their futures and for the future of their daughter. She worked for decades as a purchasing manager for a department store, looking forward to a pension that never came once the company went bankrupt near the end of her career. Bill was a garbage man. A good job, for sure, but a humble one. They had always dreamed of traveling the world, but by the time they retired Abby had needed help with the kids, and they didn’t have the stamina that they once did. Still, they had a bounty waiting for them in the next life. She was sure of it.
It had seemed longer than six years ago since she last heard his voice, since he had made his final promises. She feared that she wouldn’t even recognize him after so long. Wouldn’t recognize him in his new form, made out of pure energy, after all of the showmanship of his human body had been stripped from him. “We’re gonna go on adventures,” he had said. “We can travel anywhere, faster than light.” Looking back, the thought sickened her. He was the one dying, and yet he was the one consoling her.
Alone in her hospital bed, sleepless at 2:45 in the morning, she knew her time was coming. Her appetite had ceased three days ago. She could feel her breath growing fainter. Death seemed to be right at her bedside now, with his hands on her chest, pushing down.
She closed her eyes, and instead of seeing darkness, she saw light. Every frequency, all at once. A bombardment of color, a sensory overload. She imagined seeing Bill, perhaps taking the form of himself in his younger days, reaching out, greeting her after all of this time. What she saw instead was equally familiar, but shocking. She was spaceless, weightless, observing all of the moments of her life stacked on top of one another like pages of a book. She could see them all simultaneously, or rather, sense them all simultaneously—the awkward pains of youth, the joy and excitement of young love, the sacrificial fulfillment of motherhood. It was all there. She still existed! That was one fear she could finally cross off her list. Death had come for her, and yet she was still here.
But where was Bill? He was supposed to be beside her by now, flying over the mountains of the American west, strolling through the streets of Paris. Instead, all she saw was their slightly-too-small home, day after day of her old office, and the occasional moment of peace when they woke up early in the morning and held each other before getting up to start the daily grind all over again. No mountains, no Paris. No Bill, at least not in the way that she imagined. Just the moments of her finite life, ready to be played over and over again for eternity.
All of the trips they didn’t take, all of the late nights at work stared her in the face. All of the lazy nights on the couch looking at mindless TV or crosswords or magazines or anything else besides each other. “We’ll find each other. This life is just the beginning.”
He was wrong. This life was all they had.
“Would you like to do it over?”
It was Death, an entity right beside her. She didn’t sense him in the way that she normally would, through sight or sound or touch. But she knew he was there, knew exactly what he was saying.
As if he felt her pondering the idea to herself, he said, “You won’t remember.”
Should she go back? Risk never meeting Bill, never having Abby? Maybe she’d be able to see Paris this time. How would she know? Would she make the same mistake, defer her pleasure until it was too late, always waiting for a fantasy world that would never come?
She traveled to a moment in the middle of her life. She was sitting with Bill and Abby on the couch. Abby was only ten years old. They were playing a board game, and Bill was letting their daughter win. She had always hated that, always wanted to teach her the harsh truths of life as early as possible, the way she herself had been taught. But Bill was having fun, and Abby was too. She relaxed into the moment, let the feelings wash over her. She was overwhelmed, bogged down by the pressures of motherhood, financial insecurity, and stagnation. She was happy.
This story was published February 7th, 2022. At the time, it was an expression of one of my greatest fears.
I woke up in this kind of mood today, and didn’t feel much like writing.
I decided to share this with you instead.
I have cancer and have been told there's nothing else that can be done for me. Your story is composed of thoughts that run through my mind constantly these days, of how too many of my days are spent, words that have passed between my wife and I, couples with experiences with my mother. This can't be all there is, there has to be something else.