Smiling

I know it sounds cliché, but the whole time he was telling me he was smiling. Not mouth-smiling. Mouth-smiling is when you’re happy and you know it and you want to really show it. He was eye-smiling, which is deeper and purer and unintentional, and can come even when the rest of your face is saying

Goodbye.

I guess that’s what he was saying, after all.

It’s kind of like watching a world end, when someone dies. Their whole life becomes memories, and not even their own memories, just second-hand, someone else’s. When your life flashes before your eyes, is that when you brain deletes them? One last run through before it’s gone, wiped off of your hard drive, gone from your soul.

“Come here,” he says. His voice is raspy and weak but I come. His fingers twitch and jerk, and I put my hand in his obediently. His touch is still comforting.

“I love you.” His eyes shine deep into mine. What is it about death that brings starkness to someone’s eyes? What is it about the fullness of life that dulls them, until this moment?

I can’t think of how much I love him back and so I say “Yeah,” and hate myself just a fraction more.

The nurse comes in to check his blood pressure. We don’t say a word, but I know we’re both thinking it. There’s no point. You can’t fix it. Just more bad numbers on a page. She leaves in silence, and we’re alone again in the room.

The walls are white and beige, and I have wondered aloud before to him why hospitals choose such depressing colors. He said “You can’t tell what color a person needs,” and I always thought about that. I think he was saying that you never know the kind of mood there will be in a hospital room. For day cares, yellows and reds and blues are perfect, because you know children will always be jovial and childish. But for a hospital?

Maybe white and beige is the color of grief.

There’s a knock on the door. I don’t think either of us says anything but the doctor comes in quietly and shuts the door behind him. He has a somber look on his face, chewing on bad news or perhaps a lemon, from the looks of it. His hands came together in a clap of sound that shocked me out of my musings.

“Are you comfortable?” he asks. My husband nods his head and mouth-smiles. The doctor blinks and nods with a smile of his own. It’s like they don’t both know he’s lying, and for a split second there I can tap into the illusion.

“Good, I wanted to come in and tell you that we’re giving you just a touch more pain medication than yesterday, but it seems you’ve discovered that yourself,” he says, and smiles awkwardly. My husband doesn’t speak. They just look anywhere but each other’s eyes. I get it, I think. The living never want to acknowledge the dying. I think my love is giving the doctor space.

When the doctor leaves, his head drops to the pillow as though it was an incredible effort to keep it up, which it was. His lips smack and I respond, coming out of a reverie and pouring water into a plastic cup with a straw. I put the plastic to his lips and he drinks.

“I love you,” he says again, more insistently. It’s all I can do not to sob when he does this, so I nod instead and hate myself a little more. There’s silence again but it’s not awkward. It never has been, between us.

The big window shows a full summer scene, overlooking a park where the children playing seem tiny as ants and as momentous as life itself. I see parents on benches. They’re my age, or older, but I see a mother there with her baby in a stroller who could be younger than I am, even. It temporarily makes my heart stop. I blink and turn back to the bed.

Something is wrong.

His chest, it’s not rising and falling like it normally does. It’s labored. He’s not breathing hard or fast, but I’m so familiar with the way his breath moves in his chest, I have watched it for hours or days of my life, and I fumble around his arms for the remote. The button, the call button, I press it hard, and it seems like hours before the nurses are there, so I run into the hallway and they see me right away.

They come into the room and it’s like a tone change in a movie score. Where this morning they had been chipper and caring now their eyes said business, “move out of the way ma’am,” and something about codes.

My feet feel rooted to the linoleum, someone in scrubs has to physically lead me away. I focus on her scrub top. It has kittens on it, and little stethoscopes. It’s adorable. I almost ask her where she got it before I turn and gag and the tears start. Suddenly the beeping of machines and the brisk, loud talking wakes me out of my shock.

His eyes meet mine. “I love you,” he says. He’s eye-smiling.

And then his eyes aren’t doing anything, anymore.

“I love you,” I whisper, accompanied by a monotone of sound.