Chapter 3
Rue
Edwin dies on a Tuesday evening in the last week of October, and he dies the way I have learned to recognize as good—at home, in his own bed, on his own time, with someone who loves him in the room.
I am the someone.
That is not how I would have phrased it three weeks ago.
Three weeks ago I would have said with someone who knows him.
Some careful, professional language that admits affection without overstating it.
But I have been with Edwin Talbot for thirty-one days.
I have washed his face and combed his thinning hair and emptied the bedside basin and listened to his stories about the seventies and the eighties and the long quiet decade after his wife died when he kept her side of the bed made for two years before he finally broke.
I have read him to sleep with mountain folklore and I have argued with him about pain medication and I have laughed at his jokes, which were sometimes very good and sometimes very bad and always delivered as if the world owed him the courtesy of a chuckle.
I love him.
Not romantically, not familially. Hospice-love.
The strange, specific love that grows between a nurse and a patient in the last weeks of a life, when the patient has stopped pretending and the nurse has stopped performing and what is left between them is two human beings, one of whom is leaving and one of whom is staying, both of whom are paying attention.
I love him, and at six forty-three in the evening, with the last of the autumn sun making the blue floral wallpaper look almost lavender, he opens his eyes for the last time and looks at me.
"Rue."
"I'm here, Edwin."
"Tell Coffin—" His voice is barely there. I lean closer. "Tell Coffin the white oak was the right call."
"I'll tell him."
"And tell Margaret—"
"Yes?"
"—tell her I'm sorry about the wallpaper."
A laugh escapes me before I can catch it. It is half a laugh and half a sob, and Edwin's mouth lifts at one corner because he is, even now, pleased to have gotten the reaction.
"I'll tell her," I say.
"Good girl."
He closes his eyes. His breathing slows.
Sage—his granddaughter—is sitting on the other side of the bed holding his other hand, and her face is wet, and her grip is steady, and she is doing what I have asked her to do, which is to be present and to breathe.
Edwin's son-in-law is in the kitchen, making coffee no one will drink.
Edwin's daughter is on her way; she will not make it in time, and that is all right because she said her goodbye on Sunday and the goodbye was good.
His breathing slows further. The pauses lengthen.
Cheyne-Stokes, the textbook calls it. The body practicing for the last breath by taking smaller and smaller versions of it.
I have seen it two hundred and forty-eight times now, and it never stops being holy, and it never stops being ordinary, and somehow it is both at once.
Sage makes a small sound.
"Talk to him," I murmur. "He can still hear you."
"Papa," she says. "Papa, I love you. You did so good. You did so good, Papa. You can go. We're going to be okay."
His chest rises. It falls. It rises smaller. It falls.
It does not rise again.
I count slowly to thirty. Then to sixty.
Then to one hundred and twenty. Sage is crying now, openly, and I let her cry.
I do not move yet. I keep my hand where it is.
The body needs a moment. The room needs a moment.
The act of dying is not finished the instant the breathing stops; there is a quiet completion that takes a few minutes more, and that completion deserves its own respect.
After three minutes I close his eyes.
After five I check the pulse one final time.
After ten I look up at Sage and say, "He's gone, sweetheart. He went well."
She comes around the bed and falls against me, and I hold her.
I have done this many times. The body in your arms after a death is heavier than a body before.
The weight of the grief comes onto the survivors all at once, and the first person to catch it is the first person within reach, and that is, more often than not, me.
I hold her for a long time.
Then I do my work.
I clean Edwin. I change his clothes—Sage chose them earlier in the week, his good flannel and the corduroys that fit him before he started losing weight, no shoes because Edwin always hated shoes indoors.
I comb his hair. I shave him, carefully, because he liked to be clean-shaven and we are not going to start cutting corners now.
I fold his hands across his chest. I straighten the quilt.
I call Jo. Jo sends Della to sit with the family. Della arrives within twenty minutes with a covered dish and a basket of biscuits and the unflappable competence of a woman who has done this before more times than she can count.
I leave the cabin a little after eight.
The night is cold. The first real cold of the season, the kind that means winter is no longer theoretical. The stars are out. The compound below me—the lights in the windows, the small smoke from the chimneys—looks like a painting from up here on the path.
I walk up.
I do not, exactly, decide to walk up. I find myself walking up.
My feet take me to the workshop on the hill before I have made a conscious choice, and when I get there, the workshop is dark except for one lamp on the workbench, and Thaddeus is sitting on the bench beside Edwin's coffin, which is finished, which has been finished for two days, and which he has been waiting beside the way I have been waiting beside Edwin.
He looks up when I come in.
He does not ask.
I stand in the doorway. I cannot speak.
"How long ago?" he says.
"An hour."
He nods. He stands. He crosses to me, and he opens his arms in a small, careful gesture—a question, not a presumption—and I step into them and let him hold me.
He smells of wood and wax and clean cotton and the faint, particular warmth of a man whose body runs hot.
I have learned this in three weeks of standing in his workshop.
The wolves run hot. Their resting temperature is higher than a human's.
Standing next to him is like standing next to a stove on a low simmer, and I had not realized, until this moment, how cold I have been for the last six years.
I do not cry. I am not going to cry tonight.
That will come later, in my cottage, alone, where it always comes.
Tonight I let him hold me and I let myself be held, and I breathe in and out against the soft flannel of his shirt and I count to twelve, the way I learned to count when I was thirteen and grieving my mother and I needed a way to come back from the edge of something.
When I let go, he lets go.
"He said to tell you the white oak was the right call."
A long breath leaves him. "Did he."
"He did."
He nods. He looks at the coffin on the trestle. He runs his hand along the lid—not the surface where the initials are, but the side, the place where his thumb has been a hundred times in the building of it.
"Are you ready?" he says.
"For?"
"Carrying him."
I blink. "Carrying him?"
"He's going in the box tonight. The pack will sit vigil tomorrow. The burial will be the morning after. We carry him down to his cabin tonight, you and I, with the prospects to help. Did Della not tell you?"
She did not. Or she did and I was not, in my hospice-brain, taking new information well.
"I'm ready," I say.
He looks at me for a long moment, and what is in his eyes is not just kindness. It is a recognition. The recognition of one professional by another. The recognition that we are about to do work together that very few people will ever do.
"Come help me with the lid."
I help him.
We do not put the lid on yet. The lid does not go on until the body is in the box, and the body will go in the box at Edwin's cabin, with Sage there, with Edwin's daughter when she arrives, with whoever else wants to witness it.
What Thaddeus and I do in the workshop is something else.
We carry the empty coffin down the hill together—two prospects appear out of the dark to help us, silent and respectful, doing exactly what is asked of them and not a word more—and we set it on the trestle that has been brought into Edwin's front room, and Thaddeus opens the lid and arranges the linen lining.
The cabin is quiet. The family has gathered. Sage. Sage's parents, who arrived a little after I left. Two of Edwin's old riding buddies. Della, in the kitchen with the biscuit basket and a pot of coffee that smells like it has been brewed by someone who knows what they are doing.
Thaddeus does not rush.
He moves the way I have come to recognize—the slow, attentive grace of a man who knows that the speed of the work is the wrong measure of the work.
He goes into the bedroom and he prepares Edwin in a way I have never seen anyone prepare a body.
He does not perform embalming. Wolves are not embalmed; the body goes into the ground in something close to its natural state, and goes quickly, within forty-eight hours.
What Thaddeus does instead is something gentler.
He touches Edwin the way I have been touching Edwin for thirty-one days—with respect, with attention, with the small considerations of dignity that the dying and the dead deserve in equal measure.
He straightens Edwin's collar. He folds Edwin's hands. He places, in the curve of Edwin's right palm, a small carved wooden object that I cannot at first see and that, when I lean closer, turns out to be a tiny white oak leaf, exquisitely detailed, smaller than my thumbnail.
I look at Thaddeus.
He says, quietly, "It's something I do. They go down with a piece of the tree they came from."
"Edwin's tree—"
"White oak. The one he fell out of when he was nine."
"You knew."
"He told me, three years ago."
"You've been carrying a piece of white oak for three years?"
He does not answer. He does not need to.