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