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This is a photo of my husband and me taken four years ago by his bed in the hospice. I am doing Reiki on him which he loved, for he was a Master Reiki practitioner himself. Though he is alert in this shot, more often than not he slept.

My children would come to visit him and together we would feel the crater that was already being cut into our hearts. When my children left, I would sink into a chair and cry, pray, and afterwards take up my journal to write.

I took notes on how my husband looked; what he had murmured; what the hospice nurses had said to me about the final journey of a human being and my husband’s in particular. In this way, I stayed put. I was ever present to witness the second awe-inspiring scene of a lifetime. The first being birth; The second dying of a spouse.

Three weeks after his funeral, I went over my notes. Later, I began to draft a piece of creative non-fiction. For three years I worked on it. It kept me vitally creative in the fresh years of my widowhood, years which might have been continually confusing. Ultimately, in Nov. 2022, it was published by Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine as “A Crash Course in the Wonders of Dying.” 

Here is an excerpt:

I hurry back to my husband’s bedside. I call his name. I plead, “Please stay with me here on earth.” He has lost so much weight he resembles the da Vinci painting depicting emaciated St. Jerome wasting away in the wilderness. I close the curtains, cocooning us in floral cloth. The leaden sky presses against the window, but we two are isolated from the iciness of the universe, warmed with snapshots of our life above his bed. There are our sons and daughters, and several stick figures smiling on paper, our grandkids’ wishes for Grandpa to get well. All at once he thrusts up an arm as if someone is indeed reaching down for him. No! His mother Grace is emerging from the ceiling! I force his arm down. She cannot take him now.

Ever so long ago, her son and I met by chance on a path in a forest outside Plainfield, Vermont. He had just resigned his post as philosophy professor, bought five acres and enrolled in a summer program in ecology at Goddard College. His hope was to leave academia forever and live off his land. At the end of the summer, he proposed I join him on his five acres, where we would lay down roots. “Will you spend a lifetime with me, June?”

Dear God! That lifetime cannot be over."