Waiting

Two people are living in your home now. They stand by the windows in the front room, heads thrown back, shoulders shaking with laughter. I feel awkward, sitting here in my car in the dark, watching them like I’m some sort of creep. But since you’re gone, I don’t know what else to do.

They moved into it about a month after hospice carried you out on a gurney. To them, the apartment was a clean start, a new beginning—just as it was for you when you scrawled your name on the contract two years earlier. It was the first place you had to yourself, all on your own. Standing in front of the rose bushes your new neighbor planted a few springs ago, you asked me to take your picture. You posed with your thumbs hooked into your belt loops and smiled, and I think I mistook that smile for happiness because had I looked closer, I would have seen the truth.

It took me two weeks to divide your things among the family, and another week and a half to clean the apartment. Though I’ll admit, I could have done all of it in a few days. But I needed those extra days. After it happened, everyone expected me to just … stop. I spent months floating from my home to yours, signing medical documents, waiting on the porch for the driver to deliver your medications. I held your hand through every nursing visit, watching and learning, and giving you privacy when the nurses helped you shower because you didn’t want your child seeing you at your weakest.

I wish I had told you that dying isn’t weak. Dying is the hardest part of living. But when you’re caught in the moment, stuck somewhere between denial and acceptance, your heart does this thing where it collects all these words you know you should say, hides them in the hollow spaces between your ribs, and doesn’t bring them out again until it’s too late.

I could fill a novel with all the things I should have told you.

After my siblings claimed their share of your belongings, and charity took the rest, I could have handed the key to the landlord and driven away, put the grief behind me and moved on. That’s what you told me you wanted. And I tried. But every day, I pulled up the drive, parked my car, stepped out and walked to the door. I twisted the key, slipped inside, held my breath because for a moment, I forgot you were gone. For a moment, I expected you to be sitting at the kitchen table, sipping a cold Pepsi, playing Candy Crush on your phone. But the apartment was empty—wiped clean of everything that made it yours. I don’t know how long I stood in that doorway, day after day, blinking my eyes until I was sure I was awake. But it was long enough for the sun to start its descent, to whisper in my ear that another day was almost over, that another day without you actually existed. Losing you really happened. I can’t count the times I crumpled to the floor, a sobbing heap. I also can’t remember the short walk down the hall to your bedroom. One moment I was on the floor, my fingers tangled in my hair, and the next, I stood in front of your door, my knuckles wrapping against the white-painted wood. My heart pounded in my throat, choking me as I waited for the hushed come in.

It never came.

When I felt strong enough, I pushed the handle and slipped inside. The medical bed was gone; the oxygen machine, too. Your computer, television, books—all of it was gone. The closet door hung open—a wide, toothless sigh—revealing the empty hangers left inside. I scanned the walls, the floor, searching for something—anything to prove that you had been there, you had been real, until I found it: a small, brown circle of dried blood that soaked into the aged linoleum the day you pulled a scab from your arm and it leaked down your wrist. I told you to stop, to “Quit picking at them or they’ll never heal.” But you just laughed, waved me away.

I sat next to that spot, legs crossed, hands folded in my lap. The waning sun cut through the nicotine-stained blinds, landing like golden rods on the floor. The ceiling fan whirled above my head—the only sound in the room—and it was deafening. It sounded like absence. Like the long moment after you exhaled that last time and we sat on the edge of our seats, waiting for the intake, waiting for the Ha! Had you goin’ there, didn’t I?

There was a lot of that, waiting. Waiting for hospice to arrive to check your pulse and tell us we were wrong. Waiting for the crematorium to call and say you woke up seconds before they slid you into the furnace. Waiting for time to pass, because in those weeks following your death, time stood still. Even as it goes on, I’m still waiting. Waiting for the loss of you to hurt a little less, so that I can breathe again.

I wonder if they know you died in there, in their bedroom. If they know you kept the heater on year-round, set at a balmy ninety-two degrees because you couldn’t get warm beneath your three duvets. I wonder if they noticed the tiny holes around the front windows where you hung Christmas lights and kept them up because they made you happy. I wonder if they noticed the crayon mark on the wall left behind by a toddling grandchild, and if they had, did they wipe it away.

I watch the pair now, a middle-aged couple who can’t be any older than you were. The man, already gray, with a beard that grazes the neck of his shirt, reaches over and cups the cheek of the woman. Her shaking shoulders slow at his touch. A heartbeat passes and she stills, smiles at him something soft, melting into his palm as if the snow outside can’t touch the heat between them. She’s pretty, but with far less gray, darker hair, youthful eyes. It’s clear to me they’re in love, and all I can think about is what you wanted: to middle-age with someone who wanted to middle-age with you. Perhaps you would have tried harder—taken your medicine; kept your doctor appointments. Maybe then we could have had another fifty years with you.

But it’s done. You’re gone. All I have left of you is a box of trinkets and a head full of memories. Who knows, someday I might slip the key into the mailbox hanging by the front door with a note saying, The misplaced spare. Apologies, and drive away for the last time. But for now… Well, here I am.

THE END