Fifty-Six
What a strange business, thought Finn, waiting for a person to die.
Waiting for the person you loved most in the world to die.
He’d always thought of himself as a problem solver, but this passage, as Fern liked to call it (he hated the word), these final steps of Nina’s, were an unsolvable problem, an unstoppable force.
All he could do was sit and try to make his presence a comfort and not a burden.
“What are you going to do without me?” she’d said one afternoon months ago.
She tried to pass it off as a joke, a lighthearted remark, but he could hear the deep thrum of sorrow beneath.
“Oh, I’m not,” he said. “I’m going with you. I didn’t say?”
“Sorry, I’ve only got one ticket.”
They were out on a walk that afternoon through their neighborhood. Most of the trees had lost their leaves. A few, the maples, the ginkgoes, were still in full color. They held hands as they blithely kicked the fallen leaves on the path. She stopped and said, “I want to tell you something.”
He wasn’t prepared. “Not yet,” he said.
“Finn.” She turned to face him and made him look at her.
“I have had the most spectacular life.” And then he did the thing he’d sworn he wouldn’t do: he collapsed into her arms—the brilliance of her smile, the lambent light of it, destroyed him.
He sobbed and she shushed, and they stood that way as the sun went down.
“Come,” she finally said. “It’s getting dark.
Figuratively and literally.” She wiped the tears and snot off his face and kissed him full on the lips.
“I wouldn’t change a thing,” she said. “We released each other, made ourselves more than we were before we were together. What else can anyone ask than to be made more?”