Redbud, Cercis canadensis, its bright pink flowers stretched out from the wood line, pulling my attention from the highway. Spring, you would say every March, when we spied this first splash of color. One of the few plants that cannot be fooled into new life by an early warm spell only to frost over and die when the seasonal cold returns. I cursed myself for not bringing my camera. I would have pulled onto the shoulder and snapped a picture of this harbinger of better days. As it was, I told myself you would be just as happy to hear about it.

It was early, the pink flowers barely visible in the glow of dawn. The hospital was an hour and a half away. You told me to bring traveling clothes, that they were probably going to let you come home soon, so I shoved pajama bottoms and a scrub top into my backpack, plus an old pair of stretched-out tube socks. Your body was so swollen the day before. Loose and comfortable is what I wanted for you. I couldn’t imagine they were going to release you before removing your gallbladder—you still looked sick to me. But, as the medical professionals delighted in telling me, I was not the doctor.

Not the doctor who met you for the first time four days ago, when you were delivered to him from another hospital with a scrawled note: gallbladder. Not your family doctor who had spent the last eight months discounting every complaint, making you burn with the embarrassment that comes with asking for help that will not be given. Who fed you muscle relaxers and quips about it being hell to get old. No, thank God, I am not a doctor. I am only a woman who has loved you fiercely for a decade. Who has weathered the seasons of nature and life holding your hand. Who has slept tucked under your arm every night for nearly 4000 nights, falling asleep to the scent of your skin and the gentle rhythm of your breathing. Who wanted to be amazed with you in our eleventh spring when the Redbuds announced that we had made it through a dark and difficult winter.

***

I bound into your room, excited to kiss you, to tell you not to worry, you had made it, spring was here. I waited for the nurse, who was blocking you from view, to finish taking your vitals. I was stopped short, struck dumb, when she patted your shoulder and moved away from your bedside. Less than eight hours had passed since I’d seen you last. Had you lost thirty pounds since then? Had maintenance crept in while you slept and changed the light bulbs, casting you in a yellow glow? I kissed your dry, cracked lips and put some ice chips on your tongue. Habibi, I said, and you tried to squeeze my hand.

When you mustered the strength, you whispered that you woke up loving me. The words I’ve heard every morning for the past ten years. You tried to move, to make room for me in the bed, but you no longer had enough strength to move your own body. I laid beside you anyway, on my side, tucked under your arm, careful not to disturb the IV line that had blackened your arm from elbow to wrist.

We dozed like that for hours, waking every time a nurse or housekeeper or food tray came in. We waited for them to prep you for surgery. You worried that I would be bored, that I would worry, or cry or extract promises from the technicians who came to wheel you out from under my watchful eye. There was no reason to worry. The technicians never came.

Your nurse walked in, whistling, and removed the foley. Relief flooded your face. Maybe some of the pain would stop. I asked about the surgery and about the length of time you would be in recovery. She did not turn to face me but patted your shoulder and told us the doctor would be in shortly. When she left the room, whistling again, we stared at each other in silence. I finally said I love you but instantly regretted the way those words rang out like a death sentence.

***

More whistling. Not the nurse this time, but a doctor. Carefully I extricated myself from your embrace, got out of the bed and sat in one of those god-awful chairs they put in the rooms to discourage visitors from staying too long. The doctor stopped whistling and smiled. I was thinking smiling is a good sign when he began to talk.

No gallbladder surgery, he said in a voice that can only be described as chipper. I looked at you and smiled, See, I told you, everything is going to be okay. You can take him home, he continued, and I thought he was going to give you a prescription and we would be planting the garden together in a few weeks. Talk it over, he told us, still with that goddamn smile. We can do chemotherapy, but it’s gone so far already that I would consider hospice if I were you.

Yes, but he’s not you, is he? I looked at you, hopeful, even though I already knew where you stood on this. You shook your head. I told him I wanted to take you home. He nodded, gave me some facts, and walked out the door, whistling. I have thought at different times in my life that I have hated someone or another, but I could have killed that man and never given him a second thought. I didn’t; he’s alive and I think about him every day. A regret.

Your eyes were closed, and I cried, silently I thought, but you motioned to me, and I crawled back into that horrible hospital bed and held onto you until the nurse came in and unhooked you from all the machines. A few pieces of paper are all we got: the diagnosis, hospice information, prescriptions for painkillers. She shook her head when I asked if they could send us home with a few pills to get you through the night—against the rules. Because, for chrissakes, what a tragedy for you to become addicted to opioids now.

The hazy pink of dawn had long since passed. Not even blue—a storm had blown in and the sky was dark with rain. Tornadoes, the orderly warned as you were being loaded into the car, be careful. I opened my door and spit. Be careful of what? Death? If a tornado took us on our way home, at least we would die together. A tornado, an accident involving a semi, careening off a bridge – these things would be blessings. But then you touched my hand and said, I want to die at home.

What else was there to do but what I did? I grabbed your hand, looked in your eyes and said okay. I promised I would get you home. You leaned back and closed your eyes. I drove like hell.

The pink flowers were even more arresting against the dark backdrop of stormy sky. I looked over at you, almost called out your name so you could see spring. Your ragged breathing and deep yellow color stopped me. Why draw your attention to the Redbuds when you wouldn’t see them leaf out? When you wouldn’t see the rest of the season unfold: clumps of neon yellow pollen on pine cones, red clover blooming alongside the interstate, checking each other for ticks while the chanterelles we picked sautéed in butter? The Redbud had lied. Spring was not going to come for us.

Metastatic colon cancer that had traveled to the liver. Probably to other organs as well, the cheerful doctor told us, do we want to do more biopsies and just see where all it had gotten to? No, and let’s tone it down a bit, shall we? What the hell does it matter where the cancer has spread? He has cancer. It has spread. Hospice is recommended. I think we know all we need to know about where this is going, where this is going to take us. That’s what I thought, but I was wrong. I was wrong in the same way that you think you know what a hurricane is by watching The Weather Channel, but you don’t truly know until you are stranded on a roof.

I clung to the hope of hospice on that long drive home. We have known people, people much more deserving of death than you, who have spent years—good years—under hospice care. Even the doctor testified that his father-in-law had lived his best life during the five years (five years!) he spent in hospice. (Did he tell us that knowing you were going to die in less than ten hours?) It’s easy to see how, if I kept my eyes on the road and off you, I could convince myself that we still had time.

The trouble with convincing yourself of a lie is that you become attached to it. And it grows. By the time I pulled into the driveway I was not only certain we had time, but that the diagnosis was wrong. We had plans, dreams. Metastatic cancer was too impossible to be true. I stroked your beard until you opened your eyes. We’re home, you said, and smiled. I felt your relief and gratitude. I’m not going to die in the hospital.

***

I hate that you had nothing for the pain. I hate that none of our friends crush and snort pills. I would have paid any price for one oxy, but instead I gently tickled your swollen belly and massaged your back. Up and down, searching for some measure of relief, until you finally said you wanted to get in bed. It was unfathomable that normal life could be going on in a house down the street when Suffering and Death had invited themselves into our home and made themselves comfortable.

You hear stories about the moments before somebody’s loved one dies. How they made amends with each other, cleared up misunderstandings, let go of regrets. There was none of this for us to do. You lived your life true to yourself, kind to others, in service to God, and with the most tender love toward me.

The only thing you wanted that you did not get was a truck. You lived a beautiful life, and your dying was, in ways that are piercingly painful to me, just as beautiful.
________________
Everything came into sharp focus once we were in bed. We both knew what was happening. Worries about tomorrow and next week and next year vanished. This was us. And us did not make room for anything else. It is odd how a life can be distilled into minutes, then seconds. The 315,360,000 plus seconds we had spent together were just practice for our last ten seconds. We didn’t have to try to get it right. We had already gotten it right.

***

I heard screaming but did not realize it was coming from me. Your soul left so peacefully; mine was ripped out with a violence I could never have imagined. Who could I fight to get you back? Who could I beg, bargain with, trade a life for a life? No one. Forever it has been just you and me, facing the world together, taking care of each other. Now there is only me.

I did the things that had to be done. I washed your face with a warm washcloth. I made the calls. I gave the information. I just did not say goodbye.

Death left as quickly as he came. Suffering put on a kettle of water and settled in for tea.

***

The house is quiet now. Most everyone has stopped calling. When they ask how I am, I tell them. I can see how that is a lot to ask people to shoulder. Not everyone, not anyone, is as strong as you were.

Everything I do to plod through each day seems stupid. By that, meaningless. Writing, putting gas in the car, pouring milk over cereal three times a day, brushing my teeth, washing my hair, waking up. I only think of ways to be with you. I understand this is grief and that I am not the first to be ripped apart by it and that healing will happen if I let it, if I want it. Today, right now, I can’t say that I want it. What I want is to sleep in the crook of your arm, smell the scent of your skin and listen to the rhythm of your breathing.

The Redbud, it turns out, is also called the Tree of Judas. It certainly betrayed me, with its bright promise of a future. I cannot imagine next month or next week or tomorrow. Each day stretches out in front of me like a road to nowhere. I certainly cannot imagine making it to next March. In a year from now the Tree of Judas will bloom out again and you will not be here. Will those flowers still cause me pain? Will I be transported back to the moment I found out my life was over? These are the questions I ask when I allow myself to imagine I will be here a year from now.

There are monsters and terrors and violence in this world that I was not prepared for. Of course, no one is. This is the pain that can only come from love. If we knew ahead of time, it would be impossible to ever love anyone. We may say that we would, but that’s just the human tendency to make more of ourselves than we ought to. Deep down, we are cowards. We run from anything that has the capacity to destroy us.

The rest of the plant world is waking up from the long sleep of winter. Flowers are everywhere, and the bare branches have filled out with green. Butterflies fill the yard, yes, the giant yellow ones you loved so much. A wren is setting eggs in a nest in our breezeway, and I am listening for them to hatch out. The garden is planted, and the beets have already sprouted in a relatively straight row. Lettuce should come up next, then squash and okra. I only tell you these things because they brought you so much joy, year after year. This year I am only noticing. I pray joy will touch me again in the future, and I pray it will feel like it did when I shared it with you.

Share This: