He was out mowing the lawn, her robust eighty-year-old husband. Then, it seemed to her, the mower, still running, wasn’t moving. She looked out the window. He lay face down in the hot noon-day sun, not moving.
Called 911. They came. Accurately, they diagnosed an unstable clinical situation: he could die at any moment. They diverted to our hospital. “How soon can we send him to his hospital, where his doctors are?” The wife’s question to me. Bad enough he’s critically ill; he’s now tended by strangers. We can’t move him, ma’am. The trip might kill him. He’s bad off. She looked into my face for a reprieve from reality.
A CAT scan confirmed a large brain-stem bleed. People who survive these bleeds don’t. Prolonged coma. Life support until you die of some companion malady, pneumonia, or kidney infection. Germs attack with no morality; like wolves, they claim the weak without mercy. No question he would die soon; the only question was when, and hers would soon be a wide bed with no one beside.
She’d heard the diagnosis; she knew the heavy odds. She waited with him to be admitted to an Intensive Care bed. The neurologist had been in to see them. His news was no better than mine.
Today is their thirty-eighth anniversary, she tells me. Right after he mowed the lawn, he would clean up. They were going out to supper. She laces her fingers with his; she sits at his side and talks with him, the way we do; our loved ones always listen to us, so when we tell them not to leave us, maybe they’ll stay. She asks the nurse, “Do you think he can hear me?”
Jan, wanting to give the wife’s heartfelt question full measure, pauses. She looks at the husband. A single tear traces down his cheek. “Yes,” she whispers. “He can hear you.”
In that instant, I knew they were among those fortunate couples who would keep dancing, even when the music had stopped.
– Lucky Garvin
