Machine Dreams

house was sold and I was buying for my own house. You never see the everyday the way you might.
    She did call Dr. Jonas that very day and made an appointment. He diagnosed it and said there was no problem at all, not to worry, they could cure her with radium at Baltimore. So she went to Kelly Clinic by train. They told her it was a spot the size of a pinpoint on the mouth of the uterus. She went every three months, always by herself—we couldn’t afford anything else. Sometimes they wouldn’t find a trace in her whole body. The disease seemed to come and go like a shade. For a long time she had no pain, she would just get terribly tired.
    Once she hemorrhaged and I took her by ambulance to Baltimore. They gave her radium and deep X-ray, and she was so quickly recovered that we walked to the hotel. The room was depressing—two little single beds on steel frames, no rug on the floor, dusty, like the place was never aired. I was upset to see this was where she’d been staying all those times, but she seemed accustomed to it and talked about all the fine people she’d met at the clinic. She said the doctors and nurses were generous and kept her informed; that the patients were interesting and came from all sorts of places.
    She had every amount of hope.
    Even after the disease metastasized, she wasn’t as afraid as most people would be. Her life hadn’t been easy but she was never a downhearted type. In an odd way, I suppose she was prepared.
    The last eight months she was good and bad; then she was bad. She stopped the treatments and I kept her at home and kept her comfortable and clean. What did we give her? I don’t know, I don’t remember—whatever they gave then. Morphia, maybe. Why do you ask me all these questions? Living through it once was enough, and I hate for you to know her through these kinds of stories. I live with the fear of it, I’ll tell you. When I had the hysterectomy, I woke up in that bed in the recovery room and thought—even through the terrible pain—“good, now there’s nothing there to go wrong.”
    Right before she died, she seemed to come to herself. After two days of drugged sleep, she opened her eyes and looked all around the room. It seemed she saw everything at once without looking at any one object. She was perfectly calm, and the air of the room went still. Only for a moment … as if the room had detached from the house and come clear, the way light looks when a hard rain suddenly stops. Then she turned her head and was gone.
    I felt the difference in her hand. Her body was empty; it lay there, familiar and strange. So many months we had tended it. Then I absolutely felt her absence, and left the room.
    It’s true the body turns empty as the shell of an insect, or like something inflatable but flattened. You don’t know that until you’re present at a death. And if it’s someone whose presence is so known to you, so specific—you feel their movement, a lifting—you recognize them in what moves. Not ghostly, but amazing and too much to understand.
    That winter, my breath caught each time I heard a sigh of heat from the register in the hall. Small, silly things. I did sometimes talk to her in my mind, and answered myself with memories of things she’d said or particular details. An hour before her death, I’d given her a drink of water from a teaspoon. Monthsafterward, I felt us frozen in that instant, the spoon at her mouth. She was semiconscious and I had the feeling, as the wetness touched her lips, that I was only taking care of things—the house, the rooms, her body. Then or later, I wasn’t aware of any anger toward her, or even toward the disease. But there was so much sadness, and constant measuring up. Those cold months, I sewed or read in the evenings. Her sayings seemed present in the walls of the house—
between
the walls, as unseen as the supports and beams. Alone, without her sense of humor, the words were prayerful and heavy.
Anything worth doing is worth doing well. Sit down and collect yourself. Look until you find it and your labor won’t be lost. Hitch your wagon to a star. The Lord helps those who help themselves. Lay it in the lap of the Lord.
    She thought funerals were barbaric. We had talked it all out. She wrote her own service and wanted to be cremated. The service? I really don’t remember. She didn’t pretend to be educated; it was only a poem she’d written, a list of quotations, two hymns. Very simple. We’d thought the