The Longest Ride

Pushing open the door, he stepped onto the hard-packed dirt and gazed upward at the darkening winter sky.

Live or die. That’s what it all came down to. Steeling himself to the walk to the arena, he wondered which it would be.

28

    Ira
    W hen I wake, my first thought is that my body is weak and growing steadily weaker. Sleep, instead of giving me strength, has robbed me of some of the precious hours I have remaining.

Morning sunlight slants through the window, reflected bright and sharp by the snow. It takes a moment to realize that it’s Monday. More than thirty-six hours now since the accident. Who could have imagined such a thing happening to an old man like me? This will to live. But I have always been a survivor, a man who laughs in the face of death and spits in the eye of mother fate. I fear nothing, not even the pain. It’s time for me to open the door and scale the embankment, to flag down a passing car. If no one comes to me, I will have to go to them.

Who am I kidding?

I can do no such thing. The agony is so intense that it takes a concerted effort to bring the world back into focus. For a moment, I feel strangely dissociated from my body – I can see myself propped on the steering wheel, my body a broken wreck. For the first time since the accident, I am sure that it is no longer possible for me to move. The bells are tolling, and I do not have long. This should frighten me, but it doesn’t. In no small way, I have been waiting to die for the last nine years.

I was not meant to be alone. I am not good at it. The years since Ruth’s passing have ticked by with the kind of desperate silence known only to the elderly. It is a silence underscored by loneliness and the knowledge that the good years are already in the past, coupled with the complications of old age itself.

The body is not meant to survive nearly a century. I speak from experience when I say this. Two years after Ruth died, I suffered a minor heart attack – I was barely able to dial for help before I fell to the floor, unconscious. Two years after that, it became difficult to maintain my balance, and I purchased the walker to keep from toppling into the rosebushes whenever I ventured outside.

Caring for my father had taught me to expect these kinds of challenges, and I was largely able to move past them. What I hadn’t expected, however, was the endless array of minor torments – little things, once so easy, now rendered impossible. I can no longer open a jar of jelly; I have the cashier at the supermarket do it before she slips it into the bag. My hands shake so much that my penmanship is barely legible, which makes it difficult to pay the bills. I can read only in the brightest of lights, and without my dentures in place, I can eat nothing but soup. Even at night, age is torturous. It takes forever for me to fall asleep, and prolonged slumber is a mirage. There is medicine, too – so many pills that I’ve had to tack a chart on the refrigerator to keep them straight. Medicine for arthritis and high blood pressure and high cholesterol, some taken with food and some without, and I’m told that I must always carry nitroglycerine pills in my pocket, in the event I ever again feel that searing pain in my chest. Before the cancer took root – a cancer that will gnaw at me until I’m nothing but skin and bones – I used to wonder what indignity the future would bring next. And God, in his wisdom, provided the answer. How about an accident! Let’s break his bones and bury him in snow! I sometimes think God has an odd sense of humor.

Had I said this to Ruth, she would not have laughed. She would say I should be thankful, for not everyone is blessed with a long life. She would have said that the accident was my fault. And then, with a shrug, she would have explained that I had lived because our story was not yet finished.

What became of me? And what will become of the collection?

I’ve spent nine years answering these questions, and I think Ruth would have been pleased. I’ve spent these years surrounded by Ruth’s passion; I have spent my years embraced by her. Everywhere I have looked, I’ve been reminded of her, and before I go to bed every night, I stare at the painting above the fireplace, comforted by the knowledge that our story will have precisely the kind of ending that Ruth would have wanted.
     

     
    The sun rises higher, and I hurt even in the distant recesses of my body. My throat is parched and all I want