My Dearly Departed Significant Other

Digital art collage by Stella Kalaw

We had been together for almost 34 years when she passed away. We were young when we married, working odd jobs to put each other through university while raising two great kids and dealing with her various health challenges. The last 21 months of her life were spent working through her cancer diagnosis together.

To be suddenly alone after so long proved challenging.

After so many years, you get into a groove where you do some things automatically, because they meet your partner's needs or desires. It's all second nature, you've done it for 34 years, it's like brushing your teeth. But she's not here, so you don't need to do these little things anymore, those little things that you do anyway without thinking about them.

And if the relationship lasted all those years, it's because it was mutual. On countless Friday nights, I'd step off a late flight, weary from a week of hotels, taxis, and airports. But from the moment the cabin door opened, I could swear I caught the scent of her pasta sauce simmering on the stove at home. She always knew that after endless restaurant meals, nothing would please me more than walking into our kitchen to find dinner waiting. Today, coming home is like checking into a hotel. No matter how nice the hotel room, it's still empty, she's still not there.

Recently I dreamed of her. She was lying on a bed. It was an unfamiliar bed, not our big, messy bed with the red duvet cover, not the hospital-type motorized bed we had in our bedroom for the last year of her life, not the bed in the palliative care unit where she spent the last weeks of her life. It was a nondescript bed, covered with a white sheet, in a nondescript white room. The bed was close to a wall, in a corner.

She was lying on her side, uncovered, facing me. She was wearing white pyjamas. Her eyes were closed, and she looked peaceful. I thought she looked cold, with her legs pulled up, her feet bare, and her arms close around her chest. She was often cold. She liked a heavy blanket and usually wore socks to bed.

I took a sheet and a blanket, and I covered her, carefully tucking her in the way I knew she liked. I sensed her relaxing under the weight of the blanket. I made sure her feet were covered. Then I went to the kitchen, where I noticed that her favourite sweater, the blue quilted one with the zippered front that she wore whenever she was cold and that our daughter has now, was hanging over the back of the chair she usually sat in.

Later, after waking up, I recalled her long-standing back problems meant she had slept on her back for most of our time together, not on her side.

Recently the kids and I dropped by to visit her at the mausoleum on the anniversary of her passing. The poem by Mary Elizabeth Frye that we left in the niche with her urn provided some small measure of comfort, as it usually has over the years.

"I am the diamond glints on snow," the poem’s opening line reads.

It ends with these words:

“Do not stand at my grave and cry;

I am not there. I did not die.”

As expected, she still wasn’t there. She didn't need the sweater anymore, so she left it behind. She probably didn’t need the blanket, either, but perhaps she wanted me to cover her anyway: one last goodbye. I hope to meet her again, someday, in another dream somewhere. In the meantime, I hope she is keeping warm.