Ducks in a Row

CW: cancer, death, grief

Endings are always abrupt, whether you see them coming or not. Ethan’s end came slowly, spottable a mile away. The cancer enveloped my husband’s body, then his mind. Though I spent months sitting across the room from the illness puppeteering his body, as he screamed until he was purple anytime I came close to his thin frame, his passing still smacked me across the face cold and hard. Severance is a map set ablaze–all you can do is hope to catch sight of the trail before the flame dies out. I was not so fortunate, and so in his death, I found myself stumbling through my darkest night.

Our bedside clock was nearly as old as I was, a thrift store find Ethan insisted on bringing home. Upon plugging it in, we had both been greeted with the realization that it was faulty after years of wear. The alarm was broken, and in the place of a once a day buzz was a constant humming, which was louder than normal at times. This was one of those times. It blinked out a red 2:47 AM, taunting me with its pervasive buzz. Sometimes a good punch to the top of it reset it for a while, causing it to go quiet. I gave it two for extra measure.

In the silence, the darkness of the room was no longer just suffocating–it was all-consuming. A sigh escaped my chapped lips as my hands fumbled around the bed for my laptop. I recoiled at the brightness of the screen, my eyes adjusting to an empty document labeled “Eulogy”. The cursor winked at me. A familiar jester who, in my sleep-deprived mind, seemed to be all too aware that we had met several times before, yet each time I opened and slammed the laptop shut I had been unable to move him from his starting point. The clock began to buzz again, it seemed the jokesters had chosen to pair up in their torment. The sound ping-ponged off the walls of my empty mind, bouncing harshly back and forth from temple to temple. I stood to flip the lights on and dejectedly curled back into my spot in bed. The clock droned on, growing louder like a toddler’s ignored tantrum, and I let it. No punches this time. 

“What is there to say?!” I groaned to the cursor. 

It blinked back in acknowledgment.

I waited for the further wisdom I knew a line of vertical pixels could not give me. My eyes dug into the screen until my vision blurred. I felt myself slipping out of my body, slow and smooth like taking a nap. My consciousness hovered above me for a while. The room seemed smaller from this plane of existence–the objects distorted, the walls more abstract. I didn’t care what happened to our things. I didn’t care what happened to our home. I didn’t care to watch the sun come up in a few hours. I certainly didn’t care to write words, either. Ethan knew I was never big on them anyways. I was the quiet one, the show my love through actions one. The need to show loving actions was about ten hours away from taking a solid dirt nap with the man I signed up to do life with. 

Now life was crumbling. Fragments of it were scattered everywhere. The remnants of mine: piling laundry on the floors and piling dishes in the sink, fifteen voicemails from my concerned mother and hundreds of condolence text messages, emails, and Facebook posts from people I also didn't care about. The remnants of his, too–the defective alarm clock on our nightstand, the porcelain duck collection (also thrifted) that was collecting dust on a bookshelf in our living room, his wheelchair by the door, his bedpan shoved under the guest bed he’d claimed in his last few months. 

I watched sickness grind him to dust, and now I was left with nothing but these silly little pieces. Just ducks on a shelf and a permanent nauseous pit in my stomach that ebbed and flowed like the shoreline of Ethan’s favorite lake. It was the place he spent the most time before the diagnosis. He’d spend the morning chopping lettuce and slicing grapes to feed to the real ducks, the ones who inspired him to collect the glass ones. On the days I’d come with him I’d complain about how long his preparations took. Surely the ducks could handle a whole grape or two, couldn’t they? My impatience was always met with the same lecture about choking. They’ll get too excited and swallow them whole, kinda like you with the boba in your tea. He’d laugh. I’d pout. I’d move on to complaining about all the dirty cutting boards. It was the same schtick every time. Ethan visited the lake as long as he could, right up to the week he stopped remembering my name. I stopped drinking bubble tea shortly after he got sick. There are a lot of things I haven’t been able to stomach.

If I’d known how limited the lake was, how limited the chopping and the slicing was, I would never utter another complaint as long as I lived. I would clean a lifetime’s worth of cutting boards for one more moment of back-and-forth banter in our kitchen. For just one more single, solitary moment. 

I was snapped back into my body as the nauseous pit began to flow up out of my stomach and settle as a grape-sized lump in my throat. Goosebumps breached the surface of my skin in tiny pinpricks as a trickle of cold sweat dribbled down the small of my back. I peeled back my comforter in a beeline for the bathroom. Sprinting through the pitch black of the bedroom, my leg connected with a mound of dirty clothes and sent me flying into the wall. The air was knocked from my lungs and the nausea from my throat. I sat up, gasping for air. Tears tumbled over the brim of my eyelid, blurring my vision but leaving me in my body. I reached to untangle my leg from the laundry, tugging whatever was enwrapping it towards me. It was soft. In my desperation for comfort, I hugged it tight to my chest and let it catch my tears. My whole body shook with release. 

“What now?!” I shrieked into the fabric, “Where the hell am I supposed to go from here?!”

I pulled the laundry to my face to wipe the snot from my upper lip. In the light of the alarm clock, I could just barely make out what I was holding. The rubber ducky blanket I got Ethan for Christmas five years ago. His favorite gag gift. I went quiet. I wrapped the blanket around my body, savoring the memory of him doing the same. 

My feet carried me out of the bedroom into the kitchen, as if on autopilot. I rummaged through the fridge until I found what I needed. I sliced silently, laboriously. I took my time. I didn’t complain. I dirtied the cutting board. I packed the slices in a sandwich baggy and searched for my boots and keys.

The car was cold and the drive was quiet. I felt myself leaving my body again, worsening with each red light. I was snapped back for the second time as the GPS announced my arrival. As I pulled into the gravel parking lot, the sun began to rise.