Suddenly it has become a dark and dismal place. A place that tugs at memories, both fresh and old. A place of rebuke. Where is he? You have left him somewhere, abandoned him. This is a place that was shared. It cannot conceive itself with only you . You understand that the house is in mourning, but you also know that you cannot comfort the house. You are yourself beyond thinking or feeling of anything. Your loss is a huge abyss, and your grief inconsolable. So how can you possibly comfort the bereft house?
It will have to manage on its own.
But it hugely resents your lack of concern over its well-being. It refuses to offer you haven. As it should. As it is expected to do. It is, after all, the serene and private place that you both conceived of, worked to achieve and then revelled in. Your place of refuge and comfort, happily shared, and the world firmly shut out.
You could try informing the house that this is all a dreadful mistake. This is a nightmare from which you, and it, will both eventually awake. This nightmare will leave with the ghoulish pain of having imagined something impossible-yet-possible which you, and it will do your best to store in the deep chasm of fearful anticipation, of an event that has not yet occurred. It cannot have. Death simply cannot have so suddenly decided to make its dread visit.
There had been no calling card, no premonition, not the merest, slightest whiff of possibility.
Death, she knew, had a deserved reputation of resolute implacability, but she was also aware that there were those who managed to evade those grasping, bony fingers, to elude their determination to squeeze the unwilling soul from the unready body.
People had, after undergoing those frighteningly mystical experiences, described them. He would have defied Death. He would have informed Death that he had no intention whatever of departing. Of fleeing from her. Of deserting her. For he very well knew he must not. His powers of persuasion would have prevailed. Death would have exacted some measure of penalty, but she knew he would have prevailed.
That being so, it was impossible, not merely inconceivable, but absolutely impossible that he was gone. This was a sinister prank that some higher order was playing on her and she did not appreciate it.
Who could she call for comfort? Not her children, they were scattered all over the globe. Her children. Not quite biological offspring that most people count upon for solace. Her children were alive and well - or not alive and not at all well, but part of biographical families that she had created. They lived in the literature that she had created through her fervid and fearsome imagination. They were published works of living art. Which had been translated into more languages than she could recall. Copies of those books had been distributed world-wide. She was an author of world renown.
A friendless, nonetheless, famous author. Her friends and her family inhabited her books, and her thoughts and resulted from her need to fill in all those frustratingly awkward blank spaces.
The house emitted a bellicose roar, interrupting her thoughts. It wanted to know, have her tell it, why she had arrived back home alone. She had left earlier for the distinct purpose of bringing her husband’s notes and portfolios - the ones he had carefully instructed her to look for at his university office - back home. So they might be there, at his home study, awaiting his return. He was to be discharged in the morning. The hospital's ministrations to his sudden bout of pneumonia successfully concluded. He was scheduled to leave, released from the hospital. To her care.
Whose else? They were all to one another, there was no one else. He was the sun about which she revolved. But when she’d arrived at the hospital the front doors were locked.
En route to the university to retrieve his notebooks and the very specific portfolios that this professor emeritus had been working with, she’d received a call. From someone at the hospital. Name? Well, she could not recall. Did it matter? The voice, urgent, informing her to come to the hospital as soon as she humanly could.
But the doors were closed, they were locked and she was denied entry. She knocked frantically. Even after hours there should be someone in the lobby, but there seemed to be no one. She ran around the perimeter of the building, trying to find alternate entrances. At one she found a custodian, smoking outside the entry and asked if he could allow her in.
“Nope”, his unconcerned response. And then she explained, she had to see her husband, it was urgent, her presence was required. And the man’s face creased with uncertainty, then he leaned over and opened the door wide for her entry.
Where to go?
“Upstairs, Ma’am, you’ll see the firedoor, just push it and you’ll find yourself on the main floor.”
And then, not that long after, the nurse looking at her, looking at her, looking at her. “No one with you?”, she asked as though she couldn’t quite believe her eyes.
“No one.”
“Got anyone you can call?”
“Not really”
“Well, look, you should go home. There’s nothing more you can do here.”
Go home? There’s no one at home. He’s here. Here’s where she should stay. With him.
“You’ll come back in the morning”, the night nurse said. “Your husband’s body won’t be moved. It’ll be prepared for when the funeral home comes to pick it up.”
It? What it is that? Ralph has become an it? What on Earth is it this woman is saying?
“You do have a funeral home to call, don’t you?”
Funeral home? “No", she stumbled, "no I don’t have one. Can you recommend one?”
“I don’t know“, the nurse said morosely. “You can look in the Yellow Pages. They’re all in there. Go home, you look exhausted. Get some rest. Call a funeral home in the morning. Make your arrangements in the morning. You sure you don’t have anyone who can give you a hand?”
“No. No, no one.”
This duty nurse who appeared to be the only one around had allowed her to remain beside him in the isolated room. It was the hospital’s policy to allow this. As though special dispensation was required to permit a wife of 47 years to sit beside her dead husband’s hospital bed, quietly contemplating the years that had gone by, the bleakness of the future that stretched ahead without his presence.
No, no doctors were available, she had said. All gone for the day. It was late, they needed a break. They had done their best. It was totally unexpected. No one ever imagined…
Yet, if it was, as she quietly described, a deadly bacteria, a hospital-borne infection, how could they not be aware of the potential, and have an ameliorative protocol at hand? This is the 21st Century, medical science has advanced to an amazing degree. A bacterial infection so morbidly certain of itself that there was no prescriptive challenge to its pact with death?
A half-century of intimate companionship, her shield from the world, her protector, her lover, her friend, gone. Half-century; that’s quite the time-span. If you say 47 years together, that’s considerable, it’s long enough to elicit respect and amazement, that two people could find such comfort and companionship, along with the ardour of early-years’ physical magnetism in one another. The infinite details, the ineluctable joy and pleasure - just memories.
Were they real, did they really happen, or was this the instinct of a writer, making up her life as time progressed?
Gone, everything gone, now. She had no interest in dredging up memories. Without him they were worthless. Without him to recall with her and assess the magnitude of their profound influence on her state of mind, they meant nothing. She was unable to distinguish between what she imagined to be reality and what truth actually represented. Did it matter? Yes, it did, to her.
Her bulwark against the hostile world had vanished. Had been vanquished by Death. She would not, could not believe that he had allowed that to happen. She meant
him, not some fantasy of a human construct of an omniscient spirit benignly and alternately viciously, looking down over its creation.
She did leave the hospital. Left him lying there on that bed, still inexplicably hooked up with those electrodes all over his chest under that dishevelled gown. The mask that had covered his face had been hurriedly removed, left lying beside him. His face, so strangely grey, with deeper creases alongside his cheeks than could be considered normal for him. His hair tousled. That would bother him, He is an immaculate man.
Why was he left like that? It was an affront to his dignity.
And the remorseless pain and anguish that rose within her chest threatened to burst it asunder. The very notion of something like that happening to her was soothing, however, it would solve many problems.
Through her grief she reached over and began methodically detaching the electrodes, pulling the sticky roundels off his naked chest, then re-arranging the gown. He would be cold if she didn’t adequately cover him with that thin hospital blanket. He would catch his death of a cold…
Those slovens in their offensively cartooned scrubs seem to have laid aside their professionalism and compassion along with the traditional white scrubs.
Finally, back at home, palpably aware of the simmering resentment of the house, brooding at the prospect of hosting only her, she reasoned to herself that she must leave. This reproachful house which was their treasured home no longer exuded the care and comfort that their conceit had conceived of it.
She would leave. She would leave it to its own devices, to make another life for itself with other occupants who would not know nor care of its history.
And then reason gave her pause. What if he decided to return? Where would he look for her? Did she not have an obligation to maintain everything that he valued intact? His books, his clothing, his writing tools? Above all, his research papers, completed, not yet completed, published, unpublished. Yes, that was true, he would need them all.
And her. He most certainly needed her to be there. To welcome him back home. To throw her arms around him, and feel the quickness of his breath, the electricity passing between them, his beating heart.
She would stay, wait things out, this temporary aberration in their lives together. This … inexplicable interregnum.
Her first instinct, the knowledge that he would never abandon her had been the right one. He would find a way to return. And she would be there, in the place he was most familiar with, waiting for him.
She could feel the house relax its tension.
