When the Credits Roll

We froze in our faded velvet folding seats. It was dark and utterly quiet. The credits rolled on a black backdrop, but there was no music. Like terracotta soldiers, everyone stayed in their seats with their eyes glued to the black screen, unable to move.

It was Colette who came to first. She slowly tapped on my arm without turning towards me. I stirred.

“Don’t do that, Jack!” she whispered.

“Do what?” I whispered back.

“Tug on your beard like that. That looks painful!”

“Well, not as painful as what I’ve just seen!”

“I’m going to kill you!”

“Justified.”

A few moments later, the man next to me got up in a flurry, cursing all French movies under his breath. He picked up his empty beer bottle from the cupholder between us and stormed out while his wife followed him apologising.

Colette and I got up with the few remaining people in the movie theatre and slowly walked out into the foyer. We returned our prosecco glasses and put our coats on. We were greeted by slaps of wind and icy rain.

We ploughed towards the taxi rank, squinting against the sharp needles darting at us.  

“You bas-terd!” she said in a mock French accent, softly elbowing my chest as I sat next to her in the back of the cab.

I tried to suppress my laughter, but it burst through my pursed lips, “I’m SO sorry! I’ll make it up to you, I promise.”

The taxi driver was watching us in his rearview mirror.

“What happened?” he asked in amusement.

“My wonderful husband here,” Colette said, putting her finger to my mouth, “took me to a movie where a couple grow old and weak together, so the husband puts a pillow to her face until she dies!”

“Oh dear!” he laughed.

“And that’s not all!” she cried, “It’s MY FREAKING BIRTHDAY!”

I was laughing with a bit of amusement and a lot of embarrassment. It was true; it was her fifty-fourth birthday. I had thought for weeks in advance about the perfect present. I got her a locket that, when opened, read AMOUR. Then, I booked a table at the newest, fanciest French restaurant in town, and when I looked at the arthouse movie theatre schedule and saw the French movie Amour, I thought to myself BINGO, a French love film. 

The restaurant didn’t disappoint. The food was excellent, and the wine superb. There was a flair to the place that made us feel refined and beautiful. Well, she certainly looked beautiful. She wore a new chiffon blue dress. Slightly too cold, but it matched her earrings and brought out her milk-white skin and black curls. How could she look more attractive at fifty-four than when I met her many years prior?

“You look stunning!” I said over the candle, moving the red rose that blocked some of her neck and chin from my view.

“So you won’t be smothering me tonight?” she teased.

“I will!” I winked, reaching for her hand, “I will be smothering you in kisses, that’s for sure!”

“Well, I look forward to that,” she looked at her napkin, her cheeks turning the colour of her crimson lipstick.

When we left the restaurant, it had stopped shooting icicles. Instead, there was a glorious full moon the colour of honey against a murky black sky. A big transparent cloud attempted to conceal it from us like a jealous lover hiding his flirtatious woman from admiring eyes.

Despite her heels, Colette wanted to walk the ten minutes back to our apartment. I held her cold hand and put it in my coat pocket as we walked in silence. Silence never scared us. She and I had a million topics that we enjoyed discussing: our grown-up daughter, of course, but more importantly, poetry, movies, politics, morality, our friends’ lives or any relationships in our circle. But we also enjoyed being together, each lost in our own thoughts. She was the talkative one, but from the beginning of our relationship, she understood that a man like me sometimes needed quiet. She learned to enjoy it too.

When we got home, I reached in my pocket for my keys. 

“I would want you to do it, though!” she whispered.

“Do what? Kiss you?” I smiled.

“Yeah, that too, but I mean…” she hesitated, “help me die.”

“Wha…?” I gasped. Stupid French movies.

“Promise me!”

I shook my head.

“PROMISE me!”

“OK, whatever!” Stupid French movies.

Then I kissed her. She put her hands behind my ears like she always did. She was trembling in the cold, milky moonlight, so I led her arms under my coat, and she wrapped them around my back. I embraced her tightly as she rested her head on my chest and inhaled deeply.

This is the memory that visits me most when I’m in the cold plastic chair. She lies in her hospital bed, oblivious to my sweaty hand holding her limp one. I look over at her motionless face. Her hair, which always used to be coal black, is now showing its actual colour. The grey roots are finally free to prevail. How I wish I could dye it for her. I do, however, cut her nails and toenails and paint them violet regularly. Every night, before I leave, I spray her Guerlain behind her ears and on her wrists like she always did before bed. I read her poems by Gibran and Rumi like we did when we were first dating. I wear the clothes she bought me to showcase my “handsomeness”. I keep fantasising that one day, while I’m deeply immersed in reading a love poem, she’ll open her eyes noiselessly and observe me lovingly as she did if she woke up before me.  

But she doesn’t.

She’s my sleeping beauty but I’m a failure of a knight. She goes on sleeping even when I kiss her. Not even a groan or a flutter of the eye. This woman who wouldn’t let me sleep is now perpetually asleep.

“I’ll sleep when I’m dead. YOU can sleep when I’m dead!” she used to say as she held my eyelids open with her fingers.

But she’s not dead! How can I sleep when she’s between my world and the other world? A world I’m not allowed into? Does she hear me read her favourite books and hum her most cherished songs? Does she find peace in me holding her hand all the time? Are they treating her well in that world of limbo where she now resides? Can my yearning not bring her back? All that bullshit about how “love conquers all”! 

I cry.

“Mr Daniels, may I talk to you for a second?” Dr. Abdullahi comes close to me and looks me in the eye.

I blink away tears and look at him hoping he has good news. Vital signs are improving, or perhaps her brain scans are showing some activity.

“Your insurance called today, Mr Daniels,” he says putting a hand on my shoulder.

Oh no.

“I know this is hard,” he continues, “but after five months in a vegetative state…”

“But what do they FUCKING care!” I growl, “haven’t I been paying?”

“Indeed, you have, but they’re still obliged to pay a percentage of the cost of keeping her here,” he says in his sing-song voice.

“How much? I…”

“I know you would. I am aware that you’ve withdrawn your life’s savings for this, which is noble, but quite frankly not very wise!”

Our daughter, Ella, is now in the room with her youngest daughter and gathers the gist of the conversation. She cries as she puts her arm around me. 

“You know Dr Abdullahi is right,” she mumbles tearfully, carrying her daughter and holding us both to her chest.

Deep down, I know this is the right thing to do. Almost half a year of this. It isn’t only logistically difficult; I have to drive an hour to the hospital and back every day. I’ve stopped seeing my friends, stopped taking my walks, stopped living all together.

But the biggest difficulty has mostly been this damn hope. Hope is a dangerous, contagious disease. I didn’t have it when I met Colette, but she infected me with it. She saw everything completely differently. She always found the silver lining in problems. She danced her way out of stress and sadness. She always, always got whatever she’d put her mind to. I both admired and scoffed at that trait in her, but little did I know that she’d passed it on to me, like a socially acceptable STD. I wish she hadn’t because now hope haunts my heart. It sticks its tongue out at my reason while it grapples with a decision everyone knows is the right one to make.   

I look at Colette’s frail body hooked to what seems like tens of tubes and sensors. Her soft, veined hands, punctured. Her silver roots and sad hospital gown. I know she would hate looking like this. “Living” like this.

“But you PROMISED, Jack!” she would beat my chest with her fists.

I know I did. And it kills me. But what if she wakes up? What if we could be together again? Ella tries to reason with me. No fluff, just harsh facts.

She wouldn’t be her, she says. She now has a new kidney, which her body wasn’t happy with. She wouldn’t be able to walk everywhere like she used to do. Most importantly, she would have a diminished memory. She would most probably not know who we are.

“Is this really your Colette, Dad?” she says as she blows her nose, "because it certainly isn't MY Colette!"

It’s true. If, by some miracle, Colette does come back, she would be like the Ship of Theseus. She would have lost most of her original self; she might as well be a different person. I wonder if that would be more heartbreaking than letting her go. Letting the ship sink.

Ella leaves, pleading with me to think logically this time. I sink into the unforgiving chair and think. Another memory visits me. 

After two years of dating, Colette broke up with me. It felt like a thorny fist was thrust into my chest. Its gnarly fingers with dirty, pointy nails slowly dug a moat around my heart, twisting and turning it as you’d do with a rusty, broken lightbulb that refuses to leave its socket. I had never felt so much pain in my life.

We didn’t talk for three weeks. I quickly became a shell of a person. I lost the will to wake up if it was going to be without her messy hair on my face. I didn’t want to eat if it was going to be without her constant commentary on how that same dish was cooked and eaten in Marseille. I didn’t want to see the sunlight if it wasn’t going to dance in her eyes.

This morning Ella and I met by Colette’s bed. Dr. Abdullahi came into the room carrying a wad of papers to sign, allowing him to “release” Colette. Ella put her arm around me as she wept in silence. I looked around me for a sign to make it seem like the right decision. A feather, a butterfly, a bird’s song in the distance. Nothing.

I closed my eyes and waited. I counted to twenty. Maybe twenty seconds was all she needed to wake up. Nothing.

I signed the papers with a shaking hand. This was the end of a thirty-seven-year lease. I had leased my heart to her, and she paid me in immeasurable joy. Today she left, and with her left me all kinds of joy. Today my heart is mine, but there’s nothing left in it. Just a cracked shell.

Today the credits of my love movie rolled on a black screen. With no music.