The Dying
Short Story Fiction
Harry is dying. He wasn’t dying yesterday, nor was he dying this morning. Harry is dying this afternoon since he decided it was the better thing for him to do. He figured ninety years was enough. It was better than being towed to another hospital, another doctor, to another round of medicines, surgeries, procedures, and other postponements of the inevitable. Harry is going to die.
Rosie isn’t so sure. She would rather Harry stay since he has quite grown on her after being together for so many years. She’s always loved Harry, even though he could be quite a pain in the ass at one time or another.
Now to think of it, Harry was mean and bossy at times, but she always kept her mouth shut during those moments, which could account for the deep creases in her lips. They are eighty-nine-year-old lips, but she remembers when Harry could not get enough of them or of the rest of her, for that matter.
Rosie remembers. She remembers their wedding and the drinking and feasting afterwards. She remembers their honeymoon even better because Harry was so nervous he would barely touch her. She grew so impatient that she stripped and sat naked in his lap, wriggling unashamedly, until Harry responded. It was an agreeable moment for them both. Rosie often thought she should do that with Harry just once more, but the shock would probably kill him. Well, he’s dying anyway.
She doesn’t feel old. Oh, she knows she and Harry are old all right. All she needs to do is look in the mirror or look at his ninety-year-old sick and helpless body and, she knows they’re ancient.
She never thought this day would come. Rosie always daydreamed that she would die by the time she was twenty-five. Some tragic, dramatic death that would create everlasting mourning for her. Kind of like Jesus, whom she had great respect for.
Then she thought she would be dead by sixty. All her childhood friends were dead by sixty. Perhaps she would die of some strange and exotic illness and need to have special treatments and doctors. However, Rosie was healthier than the proverbial horse, never having been sick in her entire lifetime. So, Rosie didn’t die.
Rosie grew old when she wasn’t paying attention
Harry was sick, Harry was old, and she was old, even though inside she still felt about thirty. Forty was pushing it. How does one grow to be only thirty-five years old and end up in a tiny, fragile eighty-nine-year-old body with a wrinkled, smelly, helpless old man as her husband? A husband she still loves because she can remember why she fell in love with him in the first place.
There’s a lot she cannot remember, but she remembers the love. How unfair is that? Why can’t she remember where she left the keys to Harry’s old car instead?
Rosie loves to crotchet, so she sits by Harry’s bed and crochets a blanket to cover him. It doesn’t matter that none of the yarn matches or her fingers are so knobby and bent that it takes her forever to hook and loop it along. It doesn’t matter because it keeps her occupied while she sits in her old wrinkled body with her old, wrinkled, helpless husband while he dies. She wonders, how long does it take a person to die anyway?
Harry is dying. He’s very tired of dying which necessitates lying on beds with bunched-up blankets poking him in the ass and smelling like the toilet until someone comes to clean his bottom and change his diaper as if he were a baby. He is tired of people talking about him as if he weren’t there. As if he were incapable of understanding what is happening to him and his smelly, sagging body that has repeatedly betrayed him.
He knows his legs don’t hold him up anymore, and he knows he can only see out of one eye. He knows that he looks like a drunken, squinting sailor trying to recognize who has just walked into the room. Why does everyone treat you as if you’re blind, deaf, and stupid when you’re dying, he wonders?
Harry can hear Rosie sniffling. Is she crying? Aw, Rosie, don’t cry, he thinks sorrowfully and tries to pick up his hand to touch her. Rosie grabs it and asks him what he needs. This makes him feel like there’s a fire in his chest burning up his heart and his lungs flaming against the lump in his throat that won’t let any air in or out.
Harry’s eyes begin to leak and drip the grief he can no longer control as it leaks down his leathery cheeks and into his mouth. Rosie wipes his mouth and kisses him softly, her creased and wrinkled lips pressing gently into his. Harry feels like he’s going to die right now from wishing everything could have been different. If only.
Harry never thought he would be on his death bed saying, “If only”
Harry always thought he was doing the right thing, saying the right thing, planning the right thing. He never allowed himself to be spontaneous and do something he’d never thought of before. Or if he thought of it, to go ahead and do it and to hell with the consequences.
Harry was a good boy, a good man, a good provider, a good husband, and a good father. All the important things his father taught him he should be. That’s what a woman wanted, his father had said, and Harry had wanted Rosie so bad, he would be and do anything to have her as his wife.
It didn’t occur to him until now that he might have been boring. Why didn’t it occur to him to be all those noble things and not be boring? Now he was dying, and it would never be any different because it was all over. Shit.
Rosie is sleepy but is afraid if she goes to sleep, Harry will die, and she’ll miss it. She’s never seen anyone die before, and since it’s her husband, she wants to know if it’s true. Harry always said, “I love you so much Rosie, I will die with your name on my lips!” She wonders if people who say those kinds of things will remember to do them when the time comes.
Their daughter Olivia has arrived to come and sit beside him, so Rosie puts down the crotchet and moves into the kitchen to make tea. It’s a habit with Rosie. When she doesn’t have anything to do or has too much to do, she makes tea.
When their daughter Marissa fell into the well and nearly drowned, Rosie made tea. She rarely drinks it. She just makes it and pours it out for everyone else who seems to need it in a crisis or at an accident. Or while they try to figure out how to get a two-year-old, who is dog paddling and laughing her head off, out of the well.
Rosie makes tea
Harry loves his daughter very much, but he wishes she would go away. He wants Rosie. Olivia says she’s here to keep him from worrying and give Mum a break. What the hell does that mean? I am not worried, he thinks. I’m dying. And boring. Maybe that’s what Olivia means. Rosie needs a break from the boredom.
Harry takes a minute to think about that as his daughter pulls the wrinkled, bunched-up sheet from under him and expertly rolls him over. She places a new clean sheet beneath his diapered butt, efficiently making him so comfortable so quickly he forgets to be mad at her.
What was I thinking about again? He squints his bad eye and stares at Olivia and tries to smile and say thanks. He drools, and his beautiful first-born child softly wipes his mouth with a tissue and drops tears on his pyjamas. Harry feels the fire in his chest again, and his blasted eyes begin to leak all over his face. Olivia smiles and lets her own tears fall.
Daddy is dying. Olivia sits and stares at her father as his good eye begins to droop and finally closes into a restful sleep. Her soft fingers rub his brow, smoothing the worry lines and one squinty eye. She washes his face gently with a warm, wet cloth as he begins to snore softly.
How does one live without their father, she wonders? He has been the anchor in her world, his love the tow-line between her and the earth. She must savour every single second she has left with him, no matter how miserable he gets.
A great lump forms in her throat, igniting the fire in her chest as tears drip onto her father’s sleeve and a chasm of loneliness shows itself for a second.
Olivia is afraid
Her mother is banging cups in the kitchen, and she goes to her, hugging her gently. Rosie hugs her daughter back and hands her a cup of tea, which Olivia takes and sips gingerly. It’s hot. Mom makes such good tea.
Olivia smooths a cushion on Rosie’s favourite chair, and her mother sits, frowning and rocking. Olivia sits in Harry’s chair and talks to her mother about her father. “Daddy is dying, Mom. What are we going to do?”
Olivia notices her mother is not answering, so she makes herself busy rearranging the stack of magazines and old newspapers surrounding the two chairs. She glances up at her mother every so often to try and catch her eye, but Rosie keeps staring at the wall.
She notices that her mother’s gaze is on a photograph of her parent’s wedding day hanging on the wall opposite. She stops fidgeting, stops cleaning, leans back, quietly sipping her tea and waits. Patience, her father always said. Patience is a virtue, especially for those who don’t have it. Like her.
Rosie is far away
She is dancing in a small community centre with tall windows and crepe streamers stretched across the walls and ceiling on their wedding day. A folded paper bell hangs on a streamer in the middle of the hall, wilting from the heat and the smokey haze stretched through hours of celebrations.
Harry is holding her close, his lips against her ear and saying nothing, just dancing slowly and smoothly across an old hardwood floor. The music is from his brother-in-law’s band, whose trumpet player passed out on the floor behind a drummer that is so new that he misses every eighth beat. Nobody cares.
She is dreaming. She dreams of holding a baby in her arms and rocking as she nurses the small wet mouth against her teat, feeling the rush of milk through the swollen glands within her breast. Rosie sighs with relief and dreams of houses and curtains to go with the new lamps and blankets she and Harry received as wedding gifts.
She dreams of shopping trips with Harry and the baby and of a wad of bills that are all her own that she spends on things the new house that Harry will build for her. Rosie dreams of times gone by as she ignores that adored infant who is now grown and sitting beside her while her tea grows cold.
Harry has woken from a bad dream, sweating, and shivering with fright. Where is Rosie? Was Olivia here? Why must he dream bad dreams now? He wonders if Rosie’s father is still punishing him, even now on his deathbed.
He finally grew to care a great deal about her father, but it took a long time. It wasn’t Alfin’s fault that he had caught Harry in the backseat of his forty-nine Plymouth with another woman a week before the wedding. And it wasn’t Harry’s fault that Alfin had been having an affair with the same woman for years.
Neither of them knew Harry’s friends had set him up and with him getting so drunk, he had no recollection of himself between her jumping out of a cardboard cake and Alfin dragging him out of the car with his pants twisted around his ankles. They agreed that neither would say anything to anyone.
But Harry paid. He paid in his conscience every time he looked at Rosie and felt the great love he had for her, knowing she adored him and trusted him throughout their entire marriage. She never knew that he had, for one drunken night of fearing for his lost freedom, betrayed her in the worst way a man can to the woman he loves.
Harry’s conscience was a far worse judge than his father-in-law could ever be. Harry married Rosie and worked to forget about the woman who nailed a neon sign of guilt into his brain forever. He may not remember her name, but he carried the guilt and the fact that she disappeared with a cheque and a train ticket from Alfin. Yes, Harry paid.
The room is dark, and Olivia is gone home with promises to come at first light and make breakfast. Rosie knows she will have already made coffee and drank two cups by then. Harry may be dead by then as well, Rosie thinks. Or not.
Rosie pulls off her cardigan and drops it onto the arm of a chair Harry bought, insisting she needed a blue chair in her boudoir. Rosie never really understood what a boudoir was supposed to be, but she loved the blue chair.
Her legs were swollen enough to make her ankles disappear again, and she struggled with her left stocking as she prepared for bed. Rosie was still thinking about the wedding picture, the early days of courtship and the love between her and Harry.
She wonders how the time could have sped by so quickly. She was so sure she would be dead by now and not have to put up with Harry dying. Rosie always wanted to die first. That way she wouldn’t have to worry about heart aching funeral arrangements, relatives, and old sock drawers.
Old sock drawers that held long-forgotten items that wives weren’t supposed to see. Things like ancient train receipts and the name of someone known to be promiscuous and shallow. Someone who left her stockings in the back of Harry’s forty-nine Plymouth. Poor Harry.
Olivia cried softly, tucked warmly against her snoring husband’s shoulder. She struggled to keep her sobs silent and soft so as not to wake him. No one told her that growing up would be so painful and that losing a parent was as near to losing an arm or a leg without actually doing so.
Are parents a living part of your soul?
What happens to the soul when they die?
At least her mother was still healthy and strong. At least one person left would allow Olivia to hang on to her childhood just a little longer. She burrowed into the blankets and cried herself to sleep.
Harry’s funeral was a simple affair at the local funeral home and seemingly attended by everyone in town because there wasn’t a parking spot for miles. Rosie sat staring at the open coffin with Harry’s body all dressed up in his grey suit, hands folded across his chest in a way, so unlike anything Harry would have done, Rosie nearly laughed out loud. She stared at his waxen profile and noticed how his nose looked so much bigger than she remembered, and his ears floppier.
Her heart melted again as she thought of that wedding dance. Rosie loved how every moment since then Harry had worked so hard to make up for the fact that he had cheated on her. She knew that twit hadn’t cared about Harry. It would have been difficult had the woman loved him as much as Rosie did, but she didn’t, and Rosie had had Harry all to herself. Until now, dammit. Harry always seemed to be one step ahead of her.
After driving her home, Rosie allowed Olivia to put her to bed. Marrissa was long gone back to her own home on the west coast and her family there. Funny how one daughter leaves without a backward glance, and the other never leave at all. Rosie thought about Marrissa’s dog-paddling in the well. Ungrateful brat.
Olivia moves through the mechanics of wiping the counter and putting away the dishes. Everyone was so kind. The food was wonderful, and their friends were strong and reassuring. She tiptoes into Rosie’s room and checks her on her mother one last time before leaving for her own home.
She wonders if she should stay with her mom, just for tonight or at least a few days until Rosie gets used to being in the house without Harry. Rosie keeps saying she’s fine, so Olivia bends quietly over and kisses her mother’s soft, leathery cheek and slips away.
Rosie lays quietly curled on her side as her daughter slips out of the room. Her bed feels soft and comfortable beneath her thin, wiry frame that is much lighter than when she wore her wedding dress. She wonders how long before she follows Harry. Not that Harry would be waiting. She smiles sleepily.
Perhaps there will be a wonderful mystery to surprise her when she dies. Maybe all that baloney the preachers say is just that. Baloney. Maybe Harry is riding a motorcycle or racing a fast car that he’s always wanted to drive.
Maybe heaven isn’t some cloudy, ethereal land with gold streets and big shiny gates with an apostle standing guard with a trick question. Maybe heaven is a mind big enough, and open enough to allow Rosie to do whatever she wants.
Who said heaven was only for the dead anyway?
Who makes all these rules?
Rosie has been waiting for Harry to die for a very long time. It isn’t as if she didn’t love him. Somewhere inside of her, she knew his time was coming soon. She turned over and stared at the ceiling. Poor Harry. Sometimes words aren’t enough, and sometimes things lie in the back of your mind, like secrets in an old sock drawer.
Rosie forgave him a long, long time ago. It’s too bad Harry could never forgive himself. She didn’t think she would miss him like this. Like a there’s a fire in her chest burning up her heart and her lungs flaming against the lump in her throat that won’t let any air in or out. Rosie cries herself to sleep.
Olivia lets herself into the house quietly, hoping not to disturb her mother. She fills the reservoir of the coffee pot, spooning the grounds evenly into the filtered basket and switches it on. She thinks of tears so strong, they put her to sleep in her husbands’ arms until just a few minutes ago.
She remembers times her father held her in his arms as she sobbed over some childhood tragedy until she was exhausted and fell asleep. Olivia smiles tearfully and takes a cup into her mother.
Rosie is still asleep. Olivia smiles sadly and puts the cup on the nightstand. She sits down on the quilt that she and her mother made last year, beautifully stitched, and intricately designed just like her mother. Olivia begins to cry again as she picks up Rosie’s hand and holds it.
The hand is heavy and cold. Some kinds of sleep are like summer breezes, lively and short. Others are like winters that come in late November and hang on long past their own time.
Olivia slides her mother’s ice-cold hand beneath the warm quilt and lies down beside her. Reaching gently around her shoulders she holds her close and sobs quietly.
Rosie keeps right on sleeping.
Elizabeth Hill is Kanienkeha:ka (Mohawk) and writes from experience and a passion for storytelling. She is a songwriter, multi-disciplinary artist, and writer whose work has taken her to exploring Indigenous lands and voices around the world. Exchanging songs, ideas, the power of sound and stories to celebrate the beauty of the good mind upon the earth she is an extremely dedicated artist.
