Remembering My Husband, Again

When my husband and I had been married for a few weeks, he had to go to a funeral. This was a duty call—an old lady whom he did not know well. When he left our house, he was eager to come back soon and have another champagne-swilling newlywed dinner with me. Instead, he returned quietly, somber, almost in tears.

            “What’s the matter?” I asked.

            “I don’t want to think of the day when one of us will be without the other,” he said. A chill went through me but we were so happy to see each other again that we quickly pushed the incident out of our heads. I knew about the weak lungs but he seemed hale and hearty—was hale and hearty for years. He was far more worried about how I would feel without him than about how he would feel when his lungs failed him, as we feared they might. To the last, the moments in his hospital room when he wanted to tell me what office to go to in Limbecker Platz to discuss my pension and I, watching his oxygen levels plummet from a low but stable seventy to a worrisome fifty-nine, wanted him to rest, his first concern was always me and our children, never himself.

 In Philip Pullman’s amazing steampunk novel, The Amber Spyglass, an angel flies day and night to reach the adamantine castle of the Miltonic commander of a mission to unite worlds a corrupt church is trying to keep apart. The angel struggles to deliver a military secret while an impatient young Lucifer throws herbs on a fire to help this celestial being hold himself together long enough to impart the information. Just as the angel is struggling to get out one more sentence, an orderly knocks at the door. The brief gust of air caused by the orderly’s entrance is fatal: the angel disperses into atoms, vanishing, his last breath offered up to the cause for which he’s sacrificed everything. This angel and his single-minded devotion to his cause remind me strongly of Josef.

            In my husband’s last hours, when he urgently discussed the odd repairs needed for our elderly home, our taxes, we took breaks, during which I urged him to rest; we held hands and told the jokes we always told about our lives, our children, our work. Finally, I promised I’d be back early in the morning. We’d finish discussing these things then. I was afraid for him, and knew that when he lay down and rested his oxygen levels rose. I felt he wouldn’t rest unless I left. “Maybe I can do more a little later,” he said. “I’ll try to get on my side now.” Those were his last words to me before, like Philip Pullman’s character, he dissolved.

            I think of one of Josef’s favorite poets, Walt Whitman, who said this about dying:

I depart as air—I shake my white locks at the runaway sun;
I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags.

I bequeathe myself to the dirt, to grow from the grass I love;
If you want me again, look for me under your boot-soles.

You will hardly know who I am, or what I mean;
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.

Failing to fetch me at first, keep encouraged;
Missing me one place, search another;
I stop somewhere, waiting for you.