His Wife Leaves Him

to the men’s room a few feet away and dumps everything in the can there. He washes his hands and goes back to his daughters, both are crying now, and says “I’m sorry, for everything,” and hugs the younger one from behind while she’s hugging her sister. When did she get so tall, he thinks, for he used to tower over her and they’re now about the same height? Two doctors come out of the room, or they seem like doctors to him, white lab coats, stethoscopes around their necks. One walks over to them and says “Mr. Samuels? Dr. Bender. Because of the shock of the news, I’m not sure how much of what Dr. Kahn and I said was absorbed by your daughters before, so I’d like to also provide you with a few details of your wife’s death and what efforts were made to try and save her,” and he says “They’re smart, they understand everything, much better than me, so they’ll fill me in. Thank you for all your efforts,” and the doctor says “Our condolences, then, in your deep sorrow,” and goes down the hall with the other doctor, reading something on a clipboard he’s holding. “I don’t want to know,” he tells his daughters, “and I’d forget whatever he said. She died of a stroke; they said her chances were slim; she was very weak to begin with; that’s all that’s important.” “Maybe someday,” Maureen, his younger daughter says, and he says “No, no day; never tell me. And I’m sure I’d immediately forget what you said too. Don’t ask me why — I don’t know myself — but I’m inured, and always have been, to those kind of facts and terminology, so you needn’t bother.” Just then a nurse comes over and says “Your wife and mother’s to be moved to a private room so you all can be alone with her,” and he says “My wife and mother?” and Rosalind, his older daughter, says “Daddy.” “No, I really didn’t know,” he says. “Excuse me.” Soon after, a body’s wheeled out of the room and past them, completely covered by sheets. “That her?” he says to the nurse steering the gurney, and she nods. They follow the gurney to a single room at the end of the hall. The two nurses and aide who brought her into the room stay there, door shut, for about fifteen minutes, probably to clean her up, brush her hair, put a fresh hospital gown on her, make her look better than she did when she died, he thinks. Or maybe they did all that in the other room. If they brushed her hair, what brush did they use, since she didn’t come in with one. He’d like to have that brush. He’d put it in his dresser drawer, the top one, where he keeps his socks and handkerchiefs and underwear. Stick it in a ziplock bag first. Take it out every now and then, touch the hairs still there, maybe smell the bristles. The nurses and aide come out, the aide pulling the gurney behind him, and they go in and he shuts the door. People can still see inside through the large window in the door, but it’ll be quieter this way. Rosalind’s holding his hand — when did she take it? He thinks — and he says “My sweetheart, no slight, but let’s do this individually,” and slips his hand from hers and then thinks What did he mean? And she could have only been holding his hand to help him. Did he hurt her? He doesn’t want to look at her and see if he did, and it’d be too confusing to her if he now took her hand. He’ll try to explain it later to her. He looks around the room, out the window to the trees across the road, at the television set on a platform suspended from the ceiling, at a poster across from her bed showing the sequence of smiling and frowning and grimacing faces of pain, then at Gwen. She’s on her back on a regular hospital bed, sheet folded over her shoulders the way he did the covers yesterday morning after he got her on her back, her head on a pillow. She looks like a corpse, he thinks. The bedrail closest to the door is raised all the way, the other’s down. Must be for a reason, other than the nurses and aide forgetting, why both rails aren’t one way or the other. But what’s he thinking about that for? His daughters kiss her forehead and say things to her he can’t hear. He goes around to the other side of the bed so they all won’t be crowded at one side and looks at her and says “This is so, so…something. It’s hard to see her like this,” he says, without looking up at his daughters, “Not only my eyes, because of the water, but just hard, difficult to take. One day she’s alive — not well, but wide awake and talking and even for a few minutes, cheerful. I forget what it was. Some joke I made. I wish I could remember it. And the next day, or day after the next — I’m losing track — she’s like this, dead. I’ve had enough. I’ve said goodbye. That’s what they shooed us in here for, right? Said it yesterday. I knew she was going to die. No clear-cut reason. There was a change in her. And it’s not that she was suddenly dramatically worse. I just had a feeling. Okay, I’ll kiss her forehead.” He kisses it, looks at his daughters and says “Please permit me; I can’t do this anymore. I’m also confused. I’ve never felt worse,” and leaves the room and shuts the door and cries outside it. Hands over his eyes, deep sobs, for a minute, even less, and then wipes his face with his handkerchief, swallows hard because his throat aches and neck feels tight, and waits for his daughters. He looks down at the floor. If he had a book with him, one he was interested in, he’d read it, but he didn’t take one when he left the house. Maybe the first time in fifty years he left the house without a book he was reading or planned to start. Oh, there had to be other times, and he’s not talking about activities like jogging or grocery shopping, but even there he usually has a book with him in case he has to wait on a long checkout line. And he didn’t take one when she was rushed to the hospital after her second stroke. Like this time, he just never thought of it, or he thought it the wrong thing to do, looking for a book for later on while the emergency medical team was working on her. But he even had one at his parents’ funerals. Maybe even two if he was near the end of one, but books small enough to fit into his jacket pockets. Would he really read now? Well, he thinks he would. He hates hanging around with nothing to do and looking up and seeing people looking at him. Some of the patients and their visitors and most of the staff on the floor must know his wife just died. “Please,” he says to himself, “nobody come over and say how sorry you are for my loss.” His daughters come out ten minutes after he did. Ten, fifteen: about. “You kids okay?” he says, and Rosalind hunches her shoulders, Maureen shakes her head, both are wiping their eyes. “But you’re done now?” and Rosalind nods. “I really had a stupid thought while waiting for you. I wanted to have a book to read to pass the time.” “I apologize we took so long,” Rosalind says. “No, it’s not that; please don’t think it. It was just, I’m saying, such an odd thought to have so soon after Mommy died. Where’d it come from? I don’t know. I even thought of the book I wanted to read and why. Of course I never thought of taking it when I left in the ambulance with her. The biography of a writer I like. I’d go right to the pages — my favorite part in all biographies of writers — where we’re approximately the same age, if the writer’s lived as long as I have at the time I’m reading the book, and if he hasn’t, then to the last years of his life. I like to see how he conducted himself then and where he was in his work and getting it published and the reception to it or if he stopped writing for a while after so many years at it or just gave up. Or, like Melville, switched mostly to poetry, although he did write that last short novel that was found after he died — I can’t remember the title. My mind’s a blank. I know it rhymes with mud.” “You’re being facetious,” Rosalind says; “trying to cheer us up.” “No, I’m serious; I wouldn’t say anything light now. And the writer I wanted to read about lived well into his eighties. Parkinson’s. Died of pneumonia. Anyway, crazy, those thoughts at such a bad time, huh?” and Rosalind says “I don’t think so. I’ve had some weird ones today too.” “Same with me,” Maureen says. “Thanks,” he says. “That reassures me, for you girls are anything but…well, something. You’re commonsensible and sane. I guess we should tell them we’re done with the room. We’ll all go?” They head for the nurse’s station, but a man comes up to them and says “Mr. Samuels? And I assume these are your daughters,” and gives his name and says he’s an administrator for the hospital. “And of course my condolences for your terrible loss, and from the entire hospital,” and his daughters thank him. “I know it’s so soon after, but we have to think about what you want done with Mrs. Samuels’ body. Do you have a funeral home to contact? If you don’t we can provide you with a list of reputable ones: nondenominational, religious, whatever you prefer.” “Not necessary,” he says. “She specifically asked me, though I’ve no documents to prove it — not that I’d think I’d need them — that she be given to science,” when she’d told him a couple of times the last two years that if she dies before him, and it’s almost certain she will, she said, she wants to be cremated and a box of her ashes buried in their garden under the star magnolia tree where the boxes of her parents are. “No monument; no marker; just that,” she said. “If you can’t or won’t do it, ask the girls to.” Rosalind says “Didn’t Mommy want to be cremated? That’s what she told me. And her ashes buried near the ashes of Grandma Gita and Grandpa under…what’s that white-flowering tree in the garden by the circular driveway called?” “Star magnolia?” he says. “That’s it. The flowers come up early and sometimes stay around for only a week. But that’s what she told me. I quickly cut her off and changed the subject because I didn’t want to think of her dead and her ashes and all that, but I remember.” “Did she say that to you too?” he asks Maureen. “It seems familiar,” she says, “but I can’t say for sure.” “It’s something you don’t forget,” Rosalind says, and Maureen says “I think it was you who told me she said it.” “When did Mommy say this to you?” he says to Rosalind, and she says “A while back. I believe it was right after her first stroke. She was feeling very vulnerable then and she also said she didn’t think she’d live that long, another thing I didn’t want to hear. Poor Mommy.” “She was wrong, though, wasn’t she? She didn’t live long enough, that’s for sure, and ‘poor Mommy’ is right, but she lasted much longer than she thought she would and her last two years weren’t entirely morbid and empty. In fact, we had plenty of good times together. Anyway, that’s what I meant when I asked when did she say that. She might have expressed an interest in being cremated at one time. But the last year or so she told me numerous times — I don’t know why so many, for it wasn’t as if I wasn’t going to do what she said — that she wanted her body, for whatever good it’ll do organ recipients and research scientists, and she was dubious it’d do any good to either, donated to science.” “So,” the man says, “unless there’s any disagreement on this, I think your father should have the last word. But we have to move fast. Several of her organs need to be removed within hours and frozen or put on ice or they can’t effectively be transplanted.” “Okay with you girls?” he says, and Maureen says “If that’s what Mommy said she wanted, it’s all right with me,” and Rosalind says “I have a bit of a problem with there being nothing left of her to cremate and bury, which means nothing in the garden for me to go to when I want to be close to her like that, but I’ll go along with the two of you.” “We could arrange something to be picked up by a funeral home and delivered to a crematory,” the man says, and he says “Let’s leave it as it is. It’s sort of against what she wanted — which was, all of her donated — and it also sounds too gruesome. I wouldn’t be able to get it out of my head, knowing the ashes of a cut-up part of her were down there. I’m sorry, girls, if I’m being too graphic here, but that’s how I feel.” He goes with the man to an office to sign release papers. Leaving the office, he thinks Should he go back to the room and see her alone a last time? No, they’ve probably wheeled her away by now and he’ll never be able to find her, and the kids are waiting. Now she’s really gone, he thinks when he leaves the hospital with his daughters. “What do we do now?” Maureen says; she’s holding on to Rosalind’s arm as if if she didn’t, she’d fall. “Are you okay?” he says, and she says “I’ll live.” “Are you angry at me for some reason?” and she says “Why would I be angry at you?” “Just, your tone. I was mistaken. Well, as awful as this might sound to you both, we still have to eat. I know I’m so hungry I feel sick again. We’ll go to a quiet restaurant, if we can find one, and talk about Mommy and what a horrible two days it’s been, or just not say anything.” Rosalind says “It was all so cut-and-dried — whatever that dumb expression is…settled, final, so soon after she died, in like two hours. And now there’s no more of her, or will be, and she’s gone forever, and it upsets me. I couldn’t eat.” “I was thinking the same thing about the swiftness of it,” he says, “but what could we do? That’s how hospitals operate. Let’s go home, then, and find something, or I’ll get some prepared foods for us at Graul’s and whoever wants to eat with me, can. But I know I need to be with you girls today and I’d think you’d want to be with me.” “We do,” Rosalind says, “and I might have something.” Lying, lying, that’s all he can do and what he’s best at, he thinks, driving them home. He should have done what Gwen wanted, but couldn’t. He’d look out at the garden or walk along the driveway and see the spot her ashes were put and think of what he yelled out about her that night and how sad and demoralized she must have felt and what her face must have looked like hearing it. All because he couldn’t keep his big stupid mouth shut. She’d be alive now if he had, he’s almost sure of it. “Anyway,” he thinks, “I’ll never be sure if what I said didn’t kill her.” His daughters want to have a memorial for her, invite relatives and friends here and in New York. “It’s too much to ask of people,” he says to Rosalind on the phone, “to come that far, if they’re in New York. And if we don’t invite them and they get wind of the memorial, they’ll feel left out.” “We’ll leave it up to them,” she says, “but her friends and some of her former colleagues in Baltimore will want to come.” “Besides, Mommy didn’t want a memorial, funeral, anything like that.” “She said so?” and he says “Not recently, but one time. The subject of cremation came up, but not depressingly. This was, of course, long before she said she wanted to be donated to science — maybe even before her first stroke. I joked ‘Dump my ashes into a storm drain during a heavy storm, or down a toilet and then keep flushing till they’re all gone.’ And she said something like ‘Mine you can scatter around the garden as fertilizer, but first find out if it’s good or bad for the plants. If it’s bad,’ she said, ‘then just leave the ashes at the crematorium for them to throw out.’” “She said that? It doesn’t sound like her.” “I said she said something like it. I forget her exact words, but the ones I used were close, or at least the idea of what she said is there.” “Probably like you, she was joking. Mommy could be very funny.” “Nope, she was serious but only might have said it in a jocular way. I remember then saying something to her like ‘Really, what do you want done with your ashes if it ever has to come to that?’ and she said ‘Just what I said.’ Strange conversation to have but we had it.” “Okay, but we’re not talking about a funeral or burial, Daddy, or what she wanted done with her body after she died — we covered all that when we left her at the hospital. What Maureen and I want is a memorial for her, something simple and tasteful where peo