It comes to an end by the mailbox. But the end holds the beginning and the beginning always searches for the end.
The man, his name is Ray, begins life in 1925. He lives until this warm month of May 2012. His doctor always says he’ll get him to 90 years, while Ray jokes that some mornings when his bones ache, it’s like keeping an old car on the road.
Every morning, Ray walks to the mailbox, empties it, takes any letters back inside the house, and places them on his desk for later attention. Then he checks a small diary, always opened to the right page, to see what he entered there the night before. The diary concerns a group of rose bushes he has planted along the front of his house. At the close of each day, he notes the weather, the hours of sun or rain, whether or not he watered the roses, the presence of weeds or pests, and other general remarks. The following morning he will check his notes and decide what the roses need for the day to come. This is how each day begins and ends with Ray’s love of roses.
But on this particular morning in May, Ray suffers a massive heart attack as he arrives at the mailbox. He drops to his knees. A neighbor two doors down and checking his own mail has just smiled at Ray and raised his hand in greeting. Now he watches as Ray falls to the ground.
When he reaches Ray, the neighbor says, “I’m calling an ambulance!”
“No,” Ray says. That is his last word in this world.
Ray is a widower with three grown children (two daughters and a son) who live in places far from home. His wife and their mother, Shirley, died in 2003 after many years of cancer and dementia. Ray nursed her to the end. He was not a religious person, but Shirley was. They belonged to a church that had a ‘shepherd’ network – one member of the congregation would be asked to support another during times of loss. A woman named Margy, recently widowed herself, became Ray’s shepherd. One day, Margy said, “Ray, I am having un-shepherd-like thoughts.”
Ray and Margy spent the best part of a decade together. They never married and kept their two houses – only a block apart. Ray’s youngest daughter, Kay (who would become the family chronicler), once teased her father that together, Ray and Margy were the ‘Sartre and de Beauvoir’ of suburbia.
It takes the children time to get to the hospital where they find their father on life support and Margy at his bedside. The doctor gathers Margy and the children into a small room to explain that Ray has suffered brain death.
Soon the pastor from the church that Shirley had once chosen and Ray rarely attended, but from which such un-shepherd-like shepherding had emerged, well, soon he arrives. Who called him, thinks Kay. She dislikes the pastor. She dislikes religion generally. She bristles when he insists they gather in a circle holding hands while he utters prayers. She goes along with it because she knows her father likes the pastor. She knows the pastor comforted her father when Shirley died. She knows these things and tries to keep them in mind while holding hands and not moving her lips in prayer, yet she finds the pastor oppressive, and not only because she is a nonbeliever.
The pastor leaves eventually. Each person, alone or in little pairings and groupings, takes time with Ray. Holding his hand, talking to him, telling him secrets, whispering in his ear, kissing his cheek, brushing fingertips across his silver hair. The day passes. Margy goes home. The three grown children go to Ray’s house. They check his mailbox and find the rose diary open to the day of his heart attack. Tomorrow they will meet with the doctor and agree for Ray to be removed from life support.
The next morning, Kay finds that Margy has arrived first. They sit together in the little conference room waiting for the others and the doctor. For many people, loneliness is a constant in life. For others, it is a slow gathering, brought about by changes over many years. But for some, it comes suddenly. You are with a person every day. There are meals, errands, drives in the car, long phone conversations late at night, words you say only to that person. His voice is in your ear. His arm is linked to yours. His breaths mingle with yours. Then, when you least expect it, he is gone.
When a person has loneliness thrust upon her suddenly and violently, it shows. It shows on her face. It shows in the way she sits and walks. Her body begins to look small and unreachable as though she is already tentatively placing one foot in the cold waters of death. Some people step back, others not. It takes time.
Kay imagines all this in Margy and can find nothing to say. They sit quietly together. Then, Margy begins to sing. Just a few lines of an Irving Berlin song until her voice trails off. “Isn’t it funny,” she says, “how the old love songs come to speak of grief?”
The others arrive. The doctor arrives. A decision is made. For Ray, the year is 2015, but the year is also 1925. And all the years in between.
(Margy’s song)
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