The last time I saw her was in the hospital. She was wearing a hospital gown but in my memory she is wearing her good black suit, which was by then a little big on her. The suit is the one she was buried in and maybe this is the source of my memory’s confusion. On both occasions she was lying down.
That last time, she didn’t greet me. She had begun that rasping hard-won breathing that is one of the signs that breathing will be too hard soon, that soon it will stop. Her eyes were half open, showing a sliver of pale green. Her hair was disordered, but this did not seem strange, for her hair always had a mind of its own, as they say. She would never talk about combing her hair, but about taming it. Her right hand plucked at the white hospital blanket, smoothing it with her fingertips in the same way that she had smoothed the tablecloth on Sundays when we talked over coffee and pie. Her fingers were crooked. She hadn’t been able to wear her wedding ring for years. She was not wearing lipstick, but she never wore lipstick, although she still had one, ancient and worn to a greasy coral nub.
We were alone, the two of us, for I didn’t count the nurses who were straightening, fussing, telling each other things to which she paid no attention, nor did I. When I came into the room, I sat at her bedside, leaning toward her to speak into her ear. She can hear you still, one nurse had said, at the same time that another said only that she might.
I told her that it was snowing.
At one point the nurses seemed to think one final thing might be done, one last try, and did I want to. I wished that someone else was there to make this decision, and indeed I looked to her, who had been the arbiter of what I ate, what I wore, what books I read, when I went to sleep—for many years, even though those years were long ago.
I looked to her and she was looking past me, the pale green of her eyes a little cloudy.
Yes, I said, although I knew it was the wrong answer, and they brought machines, tubes, all of the nameless mechanisms of life to bear on her, and while they did what I had said they could do, I climbed into the bed beside her, although I don’t remember making this decision. I found myself there, hunched at her shoulder while they pushed and pulled her body, my feet rucking up the sheets. My face and hers were close and I told her that I remembered everything, by which I meant that I remembered how it was before the last bad years, when we were sometimes unkind to each other.
She had a last breath but I didn’t hear it. She had already taken it when I noticed she had stopped. I was afraid to hold her hand because it was too late now.
As I said, I remember her in her black suit, which she had bought at Bonwit Teller in the ’70s. She liked to wear it with three gold angel pins, fastened to the black wool in a diagonal line.