The Inevitable

A vast, white corridor leads me to where I wait. Wait for the inevitable. 

I sit on a chair that can barely withstand the heaviness of my shoulders and listen to your stuttering heartbeat. I see your body pressed against wires and count the futile rise and fall of your hopeful lungs. Knowing that the only medicine I could possibly offer you now is love. 

Your eyelids flicker as though your soul is deciding whether to stay here or find another, more peaceful body. A body that can fully appreciate the gift that it holds. Maybe it is better that I can no longer see your eyes. Can no longer watch them fade like unplugged stars. But I still remember the way they sparked like kindling when they set upon me. How they considered every part of my body as if it had been freshly created before them even though it had long been stretched and weathered. How they used to belong to me. 
 
In the room across the hall, I see a dull, bony metacarpus being clasped by the full, pink warmth of a man’s hand, a handshake between death and life. The inevitable seeps through every room here. A capricious trickster that feeds off your despair and chuckles at your hope.  I try to ignore the selfish way that watching this man join me in the darkness soothes me. Knowing that someone will understand the guttural call of grief that will expel from my lungs when you leave me. 

I wonder if the man across the hall once denied the inevitable. If he thought he could meet it in battle. Had believed that the cyclical nature of life and death could be fractured by pure will or ignorance alone. I wonder if he once thought love would be enough. 

I tightly entwine my fingers through yours and will your hand to warm mine. All the things these hands have done. The house they built, the garden they brought to life, the children they held. These hands have not lived long enough yet. They are calloused but not withered. They should not be giving up. They should not be fed by plastic veins and limply folding in mine. 

I wonder if the man across the hall is plucking prayers from the white ceiling like I do for you. Does he call upon a God that he has never believed in? When visiting hours end, does he too run until his muscles are shaking just so the lactic acid can smoke out the congregation of pain in his heart? I wonder if he believes that if he renders his body useless, he can bargain with death that his body should be given up instead. 

We had hope once. “A diagnosis not a death sentence” you said. I know that hope breezes its way through the rooms here too. I know it can lull the inevitable into a false sense of security and then smother it. But it did not find its way into our room my love, even though I dropped every breadcrumb to our door. I sent up every flare and blew every whistle and yet it still could not navigate its way to us. 

I wonder if the man across the hall sometimes gets angry at the injustice of death like I do. Do his pleading prayers turn to screams at the blank space instead? I wonder if he sometimes lets his lungs drown in that scream.  

You once told me that I could talk endlessly about anything I love. And yet as I sit next to you now, the man I love, my mouth has been defeated of its use. I can only hope that you feel the words in my hands as they clutch at yours, my lips as I kiss yours and my breath as it expels the air around it in the hope that it’s enough to keep the inevitable at bay. 

I wonder if the man across the hall now sees everything in grayscale too. If he too is glad that the colours that leach across the sky in the morning cannot wake him from his bed anymore. Does he sit in the sweat of his sorrow and hope his own anticipatory grief-stricken stench will be enough to ward off anyone who dares give him hope for better days. 

I wish I hadn’t lost my voice to your death. I wish I had found the words. I wish I had found something beautiful to say. Instead, I watched your body convulse and stiffen as your soul made its decision to leave. I wanted to trap it as it left and pin it to my body, make it a prisoner to my grief and demand it stay and heal me. But I let it go, along with my words.  

Your room is clean now, white, empty. The vases on the table have been freed from their lamented flowers. The machines have downed their tools and the space where your body laid is folded into neat corners. Your death is another day here. This room consistently overseeing the fight to hold onto air. From the people who lay on their beds to the people who cry beside them. 

I watch the man across the hall as he gasps at air for one over a newly, neatly folded bed. He looks at me, his face matching mine in its salted, red state. I wonder if his emotions match mine too, if his grief will make me feel less alone. I do not want it to.

I want to be alone in my love and my grief for you. I want to roll myself up into a ball inside it and wait there for the inevitable to take me too. I want it to shred me apart so that I can be scattered everywhere in the hope that even just one tiny piece will find you. That you will put me together again, the way you always have. 

I wonder if the man across the hall ever got to “Acceptance”. The last stage of grief apparently. People told me this after you died. If I could just pull myself together then I’d be cured. 

I was furious that I would have to live in this rickety, leaking structure of life without you. But the pieces of you found me. I saw you in the faces of our children. Heard you whisper through the trees outside. Could smell you in the collections of us woven throughout our house. Coaxing me to unfurl my ball of grief. Allowing me to continue.  

Acceptance came. Once the inevitable invited itself to the room again. It had watched as I lived and weakened. It had removed its malevolent mask and reached tenderly for me, invited me to lay my body in the dirt where yours had once been. Whispered that I would continue to end and begin there. Infinitely with you.  

A vast white corridor led me to where I waited. Waited for the inevitable. I’m here my love.