I was awakened by a gasp, a coughing and puffing
as if something irrepressible was seeking to take
control of something uncontrollable. This was the night
after my own surgery; tubes connected to tubes
everywhere on me, I managed to sit up and push
a button. I wanted something to happen to cut off
that coughing. I wanted someone to come and relieve
that woman next door. But the button I pressed had
become mute. The whole world must have gathered
around her bed, but the coughing lived on and on,
so I sat up in bed, knowing how keeping vigil can help
lead the spirit upward kindly. So, why does a woman
in the room next door die? Why does she have to die
or is she not dying, I wondered. In the morning, there
was an army of people crowded in both my doorway
and hers, a whole troop of her relations, until
the entire hallway was clogged up like an old pipeline.
Maybe, they needed to help her spirit rise. Maybe,
they needed to hold hands around her dead body so
she would return to us someday. Maybe they needed
to be, the way we want our children to be while we
are still alive, while we still have eyes to see them
love us, while we still have air in our lungs to breathe.
Afterwards, there was a silence as still as that calm
before a tornado arrives, before a Hurricane or that still
moment when the storm has long passed, after the wrecked
houses are bent and tree limbs have given up
their ghosts, and limping over, and the wrecked lives
of the whole town lays wasted and broken and the air,
ashamed of itself and the ground, having been betrayed,
awaits healing. My husband, down the hall, is blocked
by her army. I sit in my bed waiting, and finally,
my husband comes in, looking like someone who has
come out of the rain, unsoiled. He looks at me as
if relieved that I was still alive. He stares into my eyes
as if to say, “She’s gone,” but on his lips, no words.
Maybe he saw her stretcher wheeled away. Maybe, he
saw her family in tears. When I later tell him about
the coughing woman, he stares ahead, “She’s gone,”
he says, my fellow cancer patient next door, gone.
