Leta's daughter Vivian and her husband Ed arrived just as the
ambulance attendants were carrying the stretcher out the door. Leta was
standing on the porch in her bathrobe watching them. She vaguely recalled that
one of the medics had helped her put it on after she spoke with him in her
bedroom. It wasn’t a long conversation. They had barely started when his
colleague called for him to return to the bathroom where her husband was lying
on the floor. About an hour earlier, she was still in bed and heard a sound
from the bathroom that woke her. Or maybe she was already awake. She could have
stirred from the moment her husband Bob rose from the bed. In any case, she
went to the bathroom to check on him and found him lying on the floor, his body
splayed so much that she could not open the door more than a few inches. Nor
could she see his face. She called his name, but he did not respond.
Now he was being carried away. She watched them load him into
the ambulance.
“Ma,” Vivian said, “What happened?”
She didn’t have to ask how her stepfather was. She could see
plainly that the ambulance medics had covered him completely with a sheet.
“They think he had a heart attack,” Leta said, her voice
hollow and seeming to come from someone else.
The next several days went by with the speed of a person
stranded on an island: the minutes dragged, and then suddenly, the day was over.
Leta performed all the tasks she needed to with the assistance of Vivian and
her son Dale. They sent a telegram to Bob’s brother in Montana, his only known
relative, but time and the distance he would need to travel was too great for
him to come for the funeral.
She had been through this kind of situation before—with the
death of her beloved Albert and with her mother before him. But those deaths
occurred many years ago. Additionally, Bob’s death was so unexpected—the day
before they were taking a two-week vacation to Niagara Falls and through Ontario,
Canada. Fortunately, she had her family near to her—her children and
grandchildren, her sisters and brother. They provided comfort and much needed
assistance, as she held the funeral and burial.
Now the funeral and wake were over, and she was by herself in
the home she shared with her husband. After Vivian, Ed and Don left, she went
into the kitchen. It was immaculate. Vivian had made sure of that. She didn’t
want coffee or beer or even sherry. She poured herself a short glass of milk,
and took it into the living room. Together, she and the milk, sat quietly, part
of the stillness of the summer night. Crickets chirped their nighttime song,
and a few times she thought she heard an owl hoot. She could have been there
for only a few minutes, or actually hours, which is what it seemed to her.
She drank the milk, rose, and took the glass into the kitchen,
rinsed it out, and left it in the sink. Someone had left the back porch light
on, so she turned it off, walked out of the kitchen and down the hall, bypassing
the dining room, went up the stairs and into her bedroom. She first turned down
the bed, and changed into her nightgown. Then she went into the bathroom.
Although she had been in the room many times since her husband’s death, it
still took effort for her to go in. She could still feel his presence there and
gingerly stepped around the shadow of where his body lay.
In the mirror, an old woman looked back at her. She was only
fifty years old, but a widow—twice. Her skin was white and thin. She could see
veins here and there. There were circles under her eyes and her lower jaw
sagged. Her hair was graying and seemed to have much more white in it than it
had only six days earlier when she went to the hairdressers. Her shoulders
seemed to be caving in. She rinsed her face and patted it dry with a towel.
Then she returned to the bedroom and climbed into the bed.
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