Even though I stood well away from them in the broad doorway of our cardiac resuscitation room, I could see them clearly. I noticed the little old man as he clumsily stroked his wife’s waxen cheek with his index finger; his hand no longer strong nor steady. Strange how he didn’t notice her gaping mouth, disheveled hair, and the distinctive ashen color of her face. But then, the dead are not vain.
The old man had come to say goodbye to his lady.
I had just gone to the family room, where he had waited during her cardiac arrest, to tell him that his wife of forty-seven years had died. His gaze shifted to the floor and he nodded in resigned sorrow. After a moment, he said softly, “May I see her?”
I went ahead to prepare her body for viewing and waited at the door of the cardiac room, watching him come up the hall with one of my nurses. He moved with a deliberate, guarded shuffle, as one well acquainted with the unpredictability of strength and balance.
Both he and his wife had been to see me before as patients. Theirs was the type of romance set to song by bards and balladeers. The regard and solicitude they shared even after so many years identified theirs as an affection few will ever know.
She was not, and I suspect never had been, a woman of striking physical features. Yet certain of her facial expressions, unchanged despite the years, would emerge and I could see in her eyes and hear in her laughter what her magic was all about.
He was a man of shy virtues. But there was more, much more hidden away in him; and she had detected that specialness. So, she’d married him; and over time, they had become, for each other, a source of multiple affirmations and much of each other’s strength. Together, they were more than the sum of one plus one. Maybe that’s why we love.
They had always come to me together. They came together; they left together. But this time he would leave the hospital without her. Leaf subsides to leaf. I wanted to go to the bedside and comfort him, but I realized that this was their time. I would be an intruder.
The scythe is impartial. Whom it takes or when is a matter of complete indifference to death. Neither tears nor love, prayers, or fairness can stay its hand.
Our imaginations are poorly suited to create true-to-life models of reality. The loss of a loved one, like our own death, is an event which at best allows for only a poor preparation. Although the loss of a loved one is not unique, the pain is distinctive for each survivor. Its distinctiveness comes from the rending of the seamless union between individuals joined in love.
Had he been given the chance, how would he have said goodbye to her? What could he have told her? What gesture would have served as a fitting fare well? He shed no tears, but his sorrow hung lonely in the air. I watched as he stroked her cheek; love was in his caress and homage in his face. This had to be his goodbye. There would be no answered embrace. If he whispered, “I love you” or, “What will I do without you?”, there could be no answer.
They were two trees which had weathered the same storms; and stood in the same sunlight. Each day their oneness had grown. When the rose has entwined so long with the bower, how do you tear one loose without rending the other?
I watched him as he left the room, her wedding band, worn to a precarious fragility over the years, clutched next to his heart. He began the solitary recessional which would take him from the hospital into the waiting night, from the light into the darkness.
He had abruptly been cast into exile; left with an impossible task: by himself, to try to find a means to compensate for the loss of her; his center. He will now adjust to a lesser life, I think; richer but with a despair ever so much more poignant for having known her. Perhaps it is true: there can be no happiness without sorrow. All too often we learn the value of people after they are lost to us. We learn too late that their love, in addition to providing richness and friendship, was the source of consolation and reassurance. We learn that their love redeemed us from the certain consequences of being ourselves, alone and unimproved by their love. Within that love we came to know, to identify, not only the beloved but ourselves.
– Lucky Garvin