I awoke within a waking that was not waking.
In the pallid gloom of that chamber where we had kept our vigil for half a decade, she lay beside me. Her eyes were open. That alone was not strange, for she had often gazed into the unseen. But her right eye, oh horror, had slunk off to the side, a saucer fixed upon some distant shore invisible to the living, a stare such as one sees only in death's own theatre. And I, in my bewilderment, thought only, what is happening here?
I called her name. I leaned to her, close, to listen for breath. Some cold fragment of my soul knew even then that she was gone, that the tenant had departed the house of her body, yet I did not panic. A strange and terrible calm possessed me, an analytical coldness granted, I now believe, by some higher and pitiful power that would shield me from immediate madness. It was well, I felt. It was well. And so that she might yet perceive me from whatever dim borderland she now inhabited, I turned my face to the ceiling and raised my arms aloft, a silent benediction, a pantomime of farewell. Good journey, I told her without words. Goodbye.
After thirty years, this was the absurd terminus. A final scene worthy of Camus, whose Plague I had read in that distant year of 1974 and never understood until now. Absurdity, pure and unadorned. For we had rehearsed our ending so thoroughly. From 2020 to 2024, five long years, we had enacted every end-of-life rite together, our communion of films and music and laughter, our maintenance of the body, our shared memories replayed like videos upon a screen. We had done the work of dying while yet living. It was time, and she, upon reflection some twenty months hence, had decided of her own accord that it was time to go.
She had seen the other side. Of this I am now certain. She possessed the death-bed vision, that death-reach, that death-stare, those saucer eyes that look beyond the veil. Some unseen comforter had whispered to her that it was permitted to cross over now, that I would be well. And so she waited until I was not looking, and slipped the moorings.
There is a lacuna in my memory, a lost hour, a pit of missing time. I cannot recall my movements after the hospice attendants departed. I cannot recall re-entering the house. I remember only the phosphor glow of the Macintosh, where I sat tidying some small digital affairs, and then the thought, as if from nowhere: time to check upon her. I turned. And there it was, that dread right eye slunk hideously to the right, like a thing from a horror tale, and my only thought was, what is this? I was not emotive. I was analytical, a clockwork mind dissecting grief before grief could claim it. To shift, constantly, between the analytical and the emotive is a torment that frays the nerve to its ending, yet that was my burden.
Now, on the eighteenth day of the twentieth month, having slept twelve hours straight to cast off a feverish flu, a clarity has settled upon me like dust in a sunbeam. I have read the literature of death, the accounts of those who study the threshold, and I know now that the dying may choose their moment. And knowing Dorothy, knowing her will, which was iron, I know she chose hers.
For weeks the hospice circle had entreated me to move her to the front living room, for ease of servicing. I had delayed, I had denied them several times, for her room was her sanctum. At last I relented, and the non-emergency bearers came with their hammock to lift her from that difficult bed where I had struggled with her and for her these five years. She, the performance artist to her core, must have perceived this as her final cue. Very well, she would have thought, upon that stage. This is it. Here we go.
Her beloved dead were waiting in the wings, her adopted father among them, egging her on, reassuring her. And with the morphine, with the comfort protocol which I have only today researched enough to finally absolve, to finally understand was not a mercy killing prematurely rendered, she gathered her immense will and made her decision. She could have stayed. Such was the strength of her. But her room, oh her beautiful room, with its posted colorings and its stained glass and its chameleons and hummingbirds and the flickering westerns upon the television, and my constant attendance, that room was her world entire. To be moved from it, to adjust to the strange front room, was to be exiled. Better then, in that instant, to transition. Better to depart on her own terms, while the eye still held its strange and sovereign light, than to linger in a lesser scene.
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