Was this what they called a death rattle? The sound he made as he was breathing was a curious sound, unlike anything I’d ever heard before (or since), somewhere between a gurgle and a rasp, kind of sharp and harsh, rhythmic with his breathing. And I wondered: death rattle? When I heard it, I wasn’t afraid. I was detached, curious. Had his time really come?

My husband Al had been vomiting for days now, dark-looking stuff, brown like coffee. Dr. Lyon held off sending him to the hospital, and Al didn’t want to go anyhow. “Don’t do that to me,” he demanded in a hard voice that contained a plea within it. Because he’d had his fill of hospitals over the last fifteen years. The aortic aneurysm, the stroke, a broken hip, and now the colon cancer. This litany of afflictions started right after his retirement. Still, ever the stoic, he came back from each one. Dr. Lyon said he’d “cheated death” more than once.

So now he was vomiting and we didn’t know if it was the flu or if it was somehow related to the cancer or something else entirely. But he knew he wanted to be home—no hospital, please.

In our bedroom, during the darkness of the late-night hours, Al turned to me, lying beside him and asked me to get him some water. Makes sense, I thought, he must be dehydrated. I noticed then the peculiar sound that his breathing made. I thought—death rattle? Is this the end?   It had been years and years of illness and doctors, but always he came back, always the recovery. After the hip break, getting back on his feet again. Learning to walk again after the stroke. Always the pattern: catastrophe, then recovery. Cheating death, Dr. Lyon called it.

This cycle of illness didn’t fit the pattern of Al’s earlier life. He was a rare physical specimen, all right, handsome with a shock of dark hair and dark eyes. His tall swimmer’s body brought him championship trophies in college competitions. His gifts were intellectual too. A Ph.D. in English led to his career as a university professor. His collection of books overflowed the shelves in our study.   I had been Al’s student in one of his summer classes that I enrolled in for additional credits. I was a teacher too, 34 years old to his 52. Soon I became Al’s partner, then wife, then caregiver, witness to his suffering and struggle and strength that made him rise each time like Lazarus from the grave.

Still half asleep, I dragged myself from the warmth of the bed covers and trotted to the bathroom for the water. Al was not sleeping well; he seemed too sick, too uncomfortable. He welcomed me back to the bed and drank his water. I dove back into the covers and quickly fell back to sleep. Soon I was half conscious again, hearing Al ask again, “Water—could you get me some water?” I tried to avoid it. I was too comfortable in that bed. “Go to sleep, Al. Get some sleep.” I didn’t get him the water this time.

Who knows how much later I awoke again to hear Al call my name, “Jeanne, Jeanne.” This was unusual. He didn’t generally call me by my name. It seemed a little formal. I looked and discovered Al wasn’t on his side of the bed anymore. I got up fast and went to the bathroom where I found him sprawled on the white tile floor, his walker tilted at a crazy angle. He had fallen on his mission to get his own glass of water. I felt pretty bad about not getting up the last time he asked.

“Help me up. I can’t get up.” His voice was small and weak.

“Help me up. I can’t get up.” His voice was small and weak.

“I need help lifting my husband. He’s fallen and he can’t get up. I can’t lift him. He’s sick.”

The business-like voice: “How old is your husband, ma’am?”

“81,” I told her.

“We’ll send someone out.”

When the two police officers arrived, one male, one female, I directed them to the second-floor bathroom. I was very calm. I figured they would pick him up and all would be well. I positioned a sturdy wooden chair in the doorway of the bathroom and asked them to lift Al onto it. They did, and now I wanted Al to take his walker and move back to the bedroom.

But he sat there mute, his eyes wide open and staring at nothing, totally unresponsive to my increasing demands: “Al! Al! You have to get up! Get up!”

“I think he had a stroke,” one of the officers said. She radioed for the EMT’s.

“Al! Al!” I was annoyed, yelling at him, not comprehending that in those moments of being lifted and put in the chair, he had died. I certainly didn’t realize it at the time, or I wouldn’t have yelled. But now I look back and think, that was the moment he was gone. Minutes before and he’d been on the floor and we’d been discussing how to get him up. Now he was silent, staring, absolutely still, propped on the sturdy wooden chair I had provided.

When the EMT’s arrived, they laid him on the secondfloor landing and went to work. They quizzed me quickly on his medical history, then told the officers to get me out of there. So, I went downstairs. I waited, sitting in the blue velvet rocker in the living room. I wasn’t crying or even very upset. I didn’t understand that Al had died—even when an EMT came downstairs and asked me, “Does he have a ‘do not resuscitate’ order?” I knew he had a living will, but I impulsively told the EMT, “Do all you can.”

Then came a long period of silent waiting—rocking back and forth, not crying, not upset, calm. I was thinking, this is it, this is his time. We’d been together 30 years.   I sat there rocking and remembering—our trysts at his apartment, our backyard wedding, our year living in Italy. But I also remembered other nights when he’d come home so late with only the thinnest excuses for where he’d been. Those years were not all easy ones.

The officers stood flanking the front door, silent, impassive. I invited them to sit, but they declined, saying they sat a lot in their job. I wondered what they thought of me, so calm, not crying. I feared they may have thought I didn’t love Al or that I was happy he was dying. They were the witnesses, a wordless Greek chorus to the tragedy unfolding.

Perhaps 20 minutes went by. Maybe it was a half hour. It seemed a long time to me, sitting there in the rocking chair, still dressed in my pink flannel pajamas, worrying about what the officers were thinking of me and wondering what was happening upstairs. Finally, the EMT’s brought Al downstairs, strapped to a stretcher. His face was covered with a breathing mask. His body, restrained by straps, seemed very stiff. What I took to be the lead EMT told me they’d succeeded in restoring his heartbeat. I hadn’t really understood that his heart had stopped. Now it was beating again and I said aloud, to no one in particular, “See, they’re bringing him back.”

They took him to nearby Roxborough Hospital. I told the officer I knew it was on Ridge Avenue and she nodded. She didn’t offer me a ride. I wondered if that was because she thought I was cold and heartless. I just quickly dressed and drove through the darkness of the night time empty streets.

In the ER, after giving Al’s information, I sat and sat, still calm, not crying. I really felt I should cry. A nurse appeared and told me, with a mildly disapproving tone, that what they were doing to Al constituted “extreme measures” to maintain life. Did I want this? Would he want this? I was confused. I offered to drive home to get his living will. But I knew what it said—no extreme measures.

The disapproving nurse ushered me into a curtainedoff cubicle where Al lay, with multiple wires and tubes connected to his motionless body.   His eyes were open and staring straight ahead; his color was chalky.  The breathing machine made a rhythmic whoosh sound. The breathing mask was fixed to his face. He didn’t look alive because he was so absolutely still. I sat with Al for a while when a kind young doctor with a soft voice told me they were giving Al powerful drugs to maintain a blood pressure and they would transfer him to intensive care.

“No, no more. No more extreme measures.” I finally said what I should say—the lines that had been written for me. The doctor assured me that this was the right course, that, deprived of oxygen, Al’s brain had probably been severely damaged during the long period when his heart had stopped. So, I sat and watched and waited. After a while I asked the doctor, “Is he still alive?” I didn’t know. Soon enough he told me Al had passed. I was still absolutely calm. I felt I should be crying. I sat and sat— didn’t touch him. But I felt this was our good-bye. Thirty years. As I sat with him, I located in my mind the day’s date, May 5, 2010, a day that would be etched in my memory. May 5th—it was Cinco de Mayo, the Mexican holiday, adopted by Americans. A lot of partying today I thought. But not at my house. Cinco de Mayo will now have a different meaning.

After a little while, I took my cell phone out of my hand bag and started making the calls. Then I left the hospital, with the sun just starting to enter the sky, and I found my car in the weak light of daybreak. I put one foot in front of the other until I got to the car, turned on the ignition and headed for home. I still didn’t cry. Instead I felt a strange kind of exultation: his end had come, fate fulfilled. It would take many months before I realized the dull ache of loss, the enormity of emptiness. But then, as I drove through the morning sunlight, I just wondered what I was supposed to do next.

He’d been a good husband and a bad one too. I’d loved him with passionate intensity and hated him, too, at times. But I never wanted him to leave me. And now he had done just that.

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