HEREAFTER

HERE EVER AFTER

Charlotte knew it was time to let people know what was happening, how the situation had changed. She wasn’t often stumped for an opening for the letters she had been writing to a group of friends and family for a long time, but she was this time and finally decided it wasn’t a time for craft, rather a time to just say what was on her mind.

“Dearest friends and family,” she wrote, pausing for s scant second over separating friends from family but moving on quickly. “Jim has come home from the latest hospital stay into home hospice care. As you might imagine, this is devastating to both of us, differently for each of us.”

In the early days of figuring out how to navigate what their life had become, she thought about their fairy tale beginning – how she and her last husband, gone now for four decades, had worked for Jim, how they had all been friends, and that this marriage had not only a once-upon-a-time quality, but also was once-in-a-lifetime. She thought about how it had taken her 26 years to commit to another marriage and that now she felt as if she were losing not one, but both husbands. Everyone she was writing to knew them and their story.She wrote almost as if she were asking their advice, or blessing, about how to be as the end approached.

“Jim and I have been watching each other for cues in these last days, stepping warily around how much to talk about the end. Jim’s mind is still functioning except for some times of confusion late in the day and overnight. I try to go along with fantastical thinking. This morning, when he woke up, he was pretty sure we were high up in the sky and wanted me to reassure him that we would find the ground. Were we flying with or without benefit of plane, or were we passengers? Or, maybe, I was the pilot? Heaven help us, I don’t know how to fly a plane. Somehow, he seemed to accept my assurances.”

She was wondering to herself if he could read the confusion on her face.

“He is doing a bit of what the hospice team tells me is the end stages checklist: I did this, I did that, I didn’t do this, I’m guilty of that.”

Charlotte thought, just then, of a line she had written down from a TV series and tucked in her jewelry box: ‘If you are remembered well for how you lived your life on earth, that is Heaven.’ Jim would be remembered well, she knew that, but what about his own accounting of himself?

Once she had started telling people of the regress, so many had written to tell Jim how he had given them their first jobs and quietly mentored their careers, how grateful they were, how respected he was, how they were aware he led from behind, letting others be the star.Behind his sardonic response that they were ‘full of it’, she had seen a little smile start at the corners of his mouth as she read him the notes. She felt as if she were feeding the present with the past. She didn’t know how their fairy tale would end; or, rather, when, only that it would.

“We haven’t lost him yet,” she wrote, “so I’m hoping you will find a way to think of him, of us, as we were in your lives, maybe raise a glass, definitely smile for us, while we are still…

Jim and Charlotte”

*

One week later, Charlotte wrote again.

“Looking out our windows yesterday, to the expanse of the golf course on which we live, we saw an eagle just standing there on the grass within walking distance of our patio. I’ve seen them in trees and flying but never standing still so nearby. The bird slowly lifted and flew very close to the ground and we realized it was weighed down by a duck clutched in its talons. We had time to note that this was nature…this is what happens…and then the duck wriggled free and got away. The eagle seemed stunned, stymied, and didn’t chase it. We cheered for the duck but realized it had to be injured and probably had a short life ahead.

“Today, on Good Friday at 2 PM, Jim could no longer fight his injured body and left this earth with me holding his hand. Don’t be deceived; although it was my privilege to take care of him until his last moment and that will stay in my heart forever, there is nothing beautiful or peaceful about death and losing a great love.”

Now she knew the ending and all she wanted to do was talk about the beginning.

“We came together out of other loves.I said to Jim, the night before our wedding, how amazing the human capacity to be able to love and love again.I repeated that to him a few days ago.He said he hadn’t rememberd that I said it once before and he thought it was a great line. He told me I should write it down. Ever the coach.

“He was the witness to my thoughts, my filter for my choices….I turned to him because he had an innate sense about the rhythm of words and the cycle of actions. How lucky I was that he embraced me instantly – once we knew it was love! – as a full and equal helpmate and partner. We became constant witnesses to each other, sharing not only the deep friendship and love, but a history, having worked together so many years ago. We brought insight to this marriage from our individual experiences that guided how we chose to live together. We loved, we laughed and, sometimes, we agonized. Mostly, we laughed! We were attached. Before Jim, I lamented that I spent most of my day in an office when all I really wanted was to live and work in the same place and have the fit of conversation with someone I loved. It eluded me until Jim. These fifteen years gave us 24/7 of each other. My whole soul felt that connection every day and its loss is the first thing I understood as I held his hand and he passed into his mother’s arms and the arms of the God he believed was waiting to accept him.

“While Jim could not escape the eagle’s talons that had such a hold on his body, and I won’t have my fairy tale happily ever after ending, I can still summon happiness for him, celebrate him, and believe that he is free, at peace, and embraced by joyous love.

“He is in his here ever after.

Charlotte”