Photography And Half-Thoughts By Mitchell Hegman

...because some of it is pretty and some of it is not.

Sunday, January 8, 2012

Truth, Unwelcome

The truth, when stripped of all nicety and pretense, is often fairly ugly and sometimes jolting.  I have been considering some truths and they are as follows:
·         I adored my wife and loved her deeply.  That has not stopped.  Never will. The nearly thirty years I spent with her were all beautiful.  Day by day, they were beautiful.

·         For the last two weeks of my wife’s life, I carried her from place to place in my arms, fed her, changed her bedding, tended to her bedsores, bathed her, and I gave her (drop by glistening drop) drugs that made her lovely personality vanish to the inside.

·         I clasped her hand in the deepest pit of her final night.  I held her hand constantly as she slowly and utterly dissolved from this life.

·         For eight months now, I have been coming home to a thick silence in my house that feels like walking underwater.  At times, when I pass the room where she spent the last of her days, I hold my breath for fear I will catch the scent of her hair, which smelled of lavender.

·         The powdery remains of my wife are now held in a cardboard box in the room where she perished.  The cardboard box is barely large enough to hold my two clenched fists.  These last few weeks, I have removed all but two chairs and that box from the room.  The box sits on one of the chairs.  Bit by bit, I want to make the room go away.  Sometimes, I step inside the room and pick up the box, reflecting on what once was.  Sometimes, I pick up the box and cry, wishing only to hear a single word from my wife again.  Any word would do.

·         Here, then, the difficult truth: I do not wish to spend the rest of my days returning to that cardboard box in that room.  All I ask now is that, please, dear family and friends walk with me if I find my way to someplace new.

·         Eventually, the box must go.

--Mitchell Hegman


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