John

I remember when I met her. I don’t think I could ever forget that moment.

I remember her eyes. Bright blue and insanely intelligent.

I remember her hair. Long and black with streaks of color that would change depending on the month or season or even her mood. Pink was my personal favorite. Or blue.

I remember her smile. Boy, do I remember that. It made me feel important. It made me feel special. It made me feel like I was the only person in the world.

That’s why I loved her.

“It’s going to be okay, John.”

On our first date, I remember taking her out to a weird Italian restaurant. She had told me she liked to learn languages and was taking Italian when I first met her in our psychology class. After I had worked up enough courage to ask her out, despite my pounding heart and hands nervously shaking, I decided to take her to a place that was a little more exotic than the usual burger joint or bar.

That’s how we ended up at LA COZZA INFURIATA, New York’s finest Italian cuisine. I’m not sure if that’s their official slogan, but the restaurant got 4.5 stars on Yelp and that was good enough for me.

“La Cozza Infuriata?” she asked when I pulled up to the crowded restaurant on a Friday night. She started to chuckle. “Do you know what that means?”

I became worried. “Um, no. Hopefully it’s something good, though?”

She laughed softly, “It means ‘The Enraged Mussel.’ I wonder if their seafood is good.”

I laughed along with her. The Enraged Mussel. Only I would take a girl to a restaurant named ‘The Enraged Mussel.’ I wanted to smack my head, but instead, I forced a smile and turned off the ignition.

“Shall we go in?” I asked. She nodded with a grin.

Turns out, their mussels were pretty good. A little salty, but still very delicious.

"Stay here, John.”

On our third date, I remember we planned to go see a movie. She was big into romantic movies, and since the closest IMAX theater was playing nothing besides what she called “the cinematic injustices of 2019,” we decided to go to her apartment and watch something else.

After several minutes of laughing and arguing, we eventually narrowed it down to two classics. Titanic and Spiderman 2.

“Both have romance!” I told her. She shook her head.

“Spiderman has such a generic relationship with Mary Jane. I can’t stand them. Let’s watch Titanic, please?” She gave me her sweet, puppy-eyed look, and I relented.

“Fine.” I grabbed the popcorn from the counter and plopped down on the couch as she put the movie in. The buttery smell filled the air and exploded in my mouth as I ate a few pieces.

“I promise we’ll watch Spiderman later, okay?”

“You better keep that promise,” I said, “Or else!”

She walked over and gave me a soft kiss. Laughing, she said, “Okay.”

We never did watch Spiderman.

“You have to be brave. We both do, John.”

When I told my parents I planned to marry her, I remember how they thought I was crazy. We had only been dating for a couple of months, but I knew this was right. I needed to marry her. So, I took her out to a museum.

She loved museums; she said they provided “transportation to the past.” I thought they were a little boring, but I was willing to stand there for hours if it made her smile.

It was in front of a giant painting that I finally asked the question. There were only a few people in the room. The lights were dim, besides the bright spotlights shining on each work of art, and the room smelled like cleaning sprays and the salted peanuts being sold on the floor below us.

She stared at the abstract mix of colors, and I knelt down on one knee behind her. My hands shook. I heard a few people whisper excitedly behind me. I didn’t want to say anything. I just waited for her to turn around.

“He painted this when he was twelve, did you know that?”

She waited for me to respond, standing in awed silence, then turned around slowly to see if I had understood her. I think her eyes lit up when she saw me. She definitely smiled. I remember that she pulled her hands up to her mouth, like the typical proposal gesture of surprise. She slowly shook her head.

“I knew you wouldn’t just take me here for fun. I knew there was another reason you came here,” she said with a smile and soft laugh, “You hate museums.”

I laughed with her.

She said yes.

“Don’t worry. I’m going to be fine, John.”

She got sick the day after our first anniversary; I remember her falling on the floor, grasping her forehead in pain. She held her head over the toilet in fear of throwing up, telling me she was fine, telling me I didn’t need to call the hospital. I did so anyway. It wasn’t the first time she had complained about her headaches. And it wasn’t the first time I felt I needed to take her in. The first few times I’d listened to her insistent protests, but I ignored them now.

I sat there in the hospital for hours, my knee bouncing underneath my hands. People came and went; a soon-to-be father pacing in front of me studying a book titled Now You’re a Dad, What Do You Do?; a mother with her teenage son who clutched his head, complaining that he was completely fine and could still skateboard tomorrow; an old man on the phone, with who seemed to be his wife, explaining sincerely and apologetically that he wouldn’t be home in time for dinner. They all left eventually. I didn’t.

I just sat there alone—she didn’t have any living family to frantically call me, to rush into this hospital, red-faced and panting, because they were worried she was going to die. I was all she had left. And here I was, stuck in a crowded, sweaty waiting room while she had to undergo test after test after test alone.

When the doctor finally came, the look on his face made me sharply inhale. My heart thumped loudly in my head. He called my name and I wobbled forward, barely taking a few steps before I asked, “What’s wrong with her?”

“She has a tumor.” It was blunt. Like a club smacking me on the head, so fast I didn’t even have time to watch the hand pick it up.

“What?” I said, confusion settling in over my worry and nervousness. A tumor? A tumor? Yesterday, she was fine. We had even gone on a hike just a few days ago. She had laughed and smiled. She had acted just like herself. “A tumor?”

“Glioblastoma is the technical name. It’s a brain tumor. Aggressive. Rare.” He hesitated before he said, “And there’s no known cure. We’re going to do everything we can to fix her, but her chances of survival are very low. I’m sorry.”

He stood there for a moment, letting me take it all in. I wondered, in that brief second of time, how he did this. How he told people that the ones they loved were going to die. How he told them their life was going to end. How he broke their hearts, shattered them into a thousand, ugly shards, and left them with nothing but a bill as a pathetic type of glue to patch it all up.

That day, I discovered I don’t hate hospitals. I hate doctors.

“Don’t scare me, John.”

I remember the feeling of hopelessness that seemed to overwhelm me, just before I walked into her room, each time I returned. I was worried—worried for her, worried that I wouldn’t be as strong as she was, worried that I wouldn’t be able to help her get through this.

When I came in this time, she was flipping through the TV channels. She looked up and gave me a sweet smile. I held up a bag of popcorn.

“How about we do a movie day?”

She reached for the bag, “Yes, please!” Shoving a handful into her mouth, she handed me the remote. I put it aside and pulled out my phone.

“I actually downloaded a few so we wouldn’t have to flip through the TV. How does Titanic sound to you?” I gave her a smile.

“Hmm?”

“Titanic?” I continued as she looked at me confused, “Like the movie? With Leonardo DiCaprio? Rose and Jack? The ship?”

She shrugged, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen that one. Is it good?”

  “Good? You said it was your favorite!” My heart started beating faster, “Are you joking with me right now? Do you really not remember?”

“What?” she laughed and looked at the dimming screen on my phone, but I could see her struggle to find familiarity, “Why should I remember it? I probably just saw it a long time ago. Don’t worry, it’s just a movie.”

“But it’s not just a movie. It’s your favorite—you love it. You said so yourself.” I could hear my voice becoming frantic. “Titanic! It’s not just a movie. It’s the movie.” I looked over at her, breathing hard, my thoughts racing around my head. Then I saw her eyes, deep and blue and afraid. I was frightening her. I swallowed hard and fought to control my own fear. “Never mind. I’m sorry. I’m sure it’s nothing.”

She looked at me. Her eyes were starting to tear, shimmering with a glass-like shine, “No, John, it’s not nothing.”

“Why?” A deep feeling started to root itself in my chest. What did she mean? What was happening? “What’s wrong?”

She grasped my hand firmly then started to sob.

“Trust me, John.”

When I entered the hospital a few months later, I remember being afraid to walk into her room. The doctor said her treatments weren’t working, her time was running out. Despite everything they were doing, she was still going to die. She was still slowly losing her strength, her mind. She had forgotten many things now. That was just a symptom of the cancer. A stupid symptom. As if dying wasn’t enough.

I hesitated outside her door. In the busy hospital, full of urine and bleach, nurses and doctors shouting as they rushed past me, cries of pain sounding all around, I hesitated. I hesitated because I didn’t want to see her like she was. I didn’t want to see her in pain. I didn’t want to see her dying.

Taking a deep breath, I entered her room, plastering a smile on my face.

“Hey, honey,” I said, setting down the vase full of pink and blue flowers on her table. “I thought the room might need a pop of color.”

She smiled. “Thank you.” She took a shuddering breath, then gestured for me to sit down next to her.

 “How’s—”

“John,” she said suddenly, “I think I’m ready to die.”

The words caught me off guard. “What…”

Beeping from the monitors in nearby units and the cries of nurses and patients were the only sounds in the room.

She waited for a minute before saying, “I think I’ve used my life well.”

I looked into her eyes, saw the defeat and pain in them, and felt a fury deepen and grow in my mind. She was giving in. She was allowing herself to die. “No,” I said, “Don’t do this. Don’t give up hope.”

I turned around, my hands pressed against my forehead, forcing back my hair as she said, “Honey—”

“No. You aren’t going to die. I won’t let you. You’re going to be fine if you stop giving up. You’re being a coward. You’re—”

“John.”

“You—”

“John.”

I whipped around to see tears in her eyes. “I’m going to die, John. And you know it. I know it. There’s nothing we can do, no matter how much faith we have, how much hope. John, I am living my last moments here and I need you now. Please, John, I need you.”

“You can’t just—”

“Please, John.”

“I can’t just watch you die!” I shouted, “I can’t sit here and pretend that everything is okay! I can’t watch you fade away and be fine with that! How are you fine with that? Why are you fine with that?”

Tears ran down my cheeks as I sat down beside her and placed my head in my hands. The fury turned to fear. Fear that I was going to be alone. Fear that she was going to die. Fear that, in a few months, there would be nothing left of her. I felt her soft touch as she stroked her shaking fingers through my hair. I sobbed into my hands and cried, “Why?”

“John?”

I remember her last moment in this world. She was in a hospital bed, looking pale and sick. The room smelled like stale hospital food, like the stiff chocolate muffins and chewy bacon, like the dry burger patties and inedible plates of hardened pasta. It was hot and congested in there. I wanted to get away, frantically wheel her out of the hospital and escape back to our first night together. Back to La Cozza Infuriata. Back to her couch. Even back to the museum. Anywhere but here. Anywhere but the hospital that smelled like life and death, joy and pain, happiness and misery.

But I had to stay. The tumor had grown. She was fading away.

When I entered the room now, her eyes didn’t light up. They just flickered briefly with the same uncaring and unimportant recognition you would have if you passed someone twice while walking in the street. I was just a visitor to her. I wasn’t her love. Her husband. Her John.

“Hi,” I told her, waving my hand in a pathetic gesture. I couldn’t bring myself to lift it high or fake the joy I did on the first day I walked in here knowing she had no idea who I was. I wondered if she saw a change in me. If she noticed how, with each fading breath she took, a part of me faded away as well. If she saw how I died every day that she grew closer to death herself.

“Hi,” she told me weakly. She still smiled though she struggled to say the word. My heart broke with each raspy breath that shuddered her chest as she inhaled and exhaled. She started to sit up, reaching for my hand, but she was too weak.

I took a few steps towards her, grasping her hand in mine once I got close enough. Her breaths echoed in the silence—defeated, lost, dying—and I let myself, for the first time during her sickness, throw an axe through the paper walls I had been fighting so hard to keep. “I love you, Sara,” I whispered, feeling myself breaking down with each word, “I love you so much.”

She started to whisper something under her breath, but I couldn’t hear it. I pressed her hand to my lips, then continued, “I love your smile. Your love for art. I love how you’re always so cheerful. You’re always so brave.” I kept going, despite the tears flowing from my eyes, despite the fact that I was only confessing to myself at this point, “I haven’t been brave, and I’m so sorry for that, Sara. I’m sorry for my fears. My distance. I am so sorry that you had to be the strong one. I’m here for you, Sara. I’m here now. I know it's late, but I’m here.”

Her monitors beeped as I pressed my face into her hand and let my tears soak into her blankets. I felt a soft pressure on my fingertips and glanced up to see her smile. A true smile. A Sara smile. That smile told me she remembered, she loved me, it would all be okay.

Then she fell back abruptly. Her eyes fluttered. They closed softly. My heart stopped. Not now, I thought, please not now. I yelled for the doctor, not wanting to leave her side.

“It’s going to be okay, Sara. It’s going to be okay.” I repeated those words into her ear as I stroked her forehead. Her body stopped moving. Her chest stopped rising. I stayed by her side until I was pushed away by the nurses and doctors that crowded her body and tried to bring her back to life.

But she was gone.

I cried that night. Even though I knew she was going to die eventually. Even though I knew we were on borrowed time. I still cried. It hurt knowing that she was gone. That she wouldn’t be here. That I would never see her smile again. I still cry. I cry when I see a museum, or an Italian restaurant, or even a Spiderman action figure on a Walmart shelf.

The pain never stops. I just learn to live with it. I try to use my life well, like she did. I try to be better. Act better. Be someone she would be proud of. It’s hard, but I try.

And even though she’s gone, I will always remember her.

Always.

“I love you, John.”