The last time I saw my husband

“Please come back. I take it back, I’m not ready. Please come back!”

I was sobbing, tears falling past my face to my shirt, the sheets, my husband’s face. I’d never been a “pretty crier,” like the actresses in beautiful scenes of emotions I’d seen in movies. My face tries to come in on itself and hide in my body. I haven’t worn makeup in days, so raccoon eyes aren’t something I will have to clean up later. This is real life, not a movie to be started and stopped when you need a break. There is no coming out of this, no director about to bring me out of a scene before Bob died with a “cut!”

“I lied. I’m so sorry, I lied. Please come back.”

I’d told Bob for hours that it was okay for him to go into whatever light he saw. I’d told him for hours that I’d be okay and I’d raise our daughters for him. That we’d all be okay. He had fought long enough. It was okay for him to rest.

But he held on.

“He’s even too stubborn to die when we ask him to,” his younger brother, Mike, joked on a smoke break. Bob was never a man to do the expected. He never wanted to do something he didn’t want to do just because it was expected. That was my husband. The man who asked me to date him on January second, because Christmas was cliche and he was far too hungover on New Year’s Day. The man who asked me to marry him twenty minutes after I’d announced I was “done with weddings” and never wanted to get married. Because that’s when I least expected it.

I groped for the hospital bed remote, somehow it had disappeared when my husband hadn’t been moving. I repeatedly hit the call button for the nurse.

The two of us had been alone. After a day full of guests, family, doctors, and nurses, we were finally alone. Mike was driving back home with their grandmother and Mike’s girlfriend. Ryan had just taken Bob’s parents to a hotel room he had booked so they could get a few hours of sleep.

Bob and I were finally alone, just like he wanted.

I had just taken my first half dose of Xanax, just to maybe help me relax a little, maybe even sleep. I’d only slept 3 hours in the last 2 days, not counting the fitful dozing sitting beside his bed and holding his hand. I have been squeezing it to feel him squeeze back when he could no longer talk. I squeezed his hand so he’d know I was there even when he stopped squeezing back. My mind drifted to the fight we’d had for years over whether it was “squeezed” or “squoze.” His best friend Dave had started using the word, and Bob and Ryan had picked it up. I always lament that “squoze” isn’t a real word, it’s made up and can’t be used. Bob always laughs and reminds me that my sister, who is a high school English teacher, is on his side that it is a real word. A debate that had started almost eight years before that still came up in every way.

The nurse ran in, checked his breath (or lack of it), and ran out again. When she came back she pulled me away from him, turning me to cry into her scrubs instead of his still chest. She used all the gentleness she could, but in her nurse way made sure I moved out of the way of the doctor and other staff that had rushed in.

She held me tight because my legs could not quite support me. I felt like I couldn’t breathe, but didn’t know if she was holding me too tight, or I was crying too hard to get air, or if the world had suddenly lost all its oxygen and I was the first to notice.

I heard the doctor talking, stating a time of death. There was noise around me, not discernable over the whooshing sound in my ears. I barely heard anything over my own sobbing. At that moment I didn’t care if someone saw me crying or heard me out in the hall. I had spent a lifetime holding in my own feelings and years of therapy learning how to let them out. Now the man I shared everything with was gone. The only person who knew me inside and out and loved me because of everything I was… he was gone.

I have read how it feels like someone has left the room when they die. Their body is still there but they aren’t.

I had been standing by the desk in the hospital room before he died, the desk that made me think more of a college dorm room than a hospital room. I’d been putting the pill cutter and the Xanax back in the cavern of my purse. Bob always lamented about every purse I had resembling a huge black hole, no matter the size of the actual bag. He was quiet in bed, no longer responsive.

He was covered by the sheets and looked more peaceful without his neck brace. He looked more like a man who would pull through these impossible odds. When he was moved to the oncology unit from the ICU for the final time the nurses had removed the brace. He had fought with them (and me) all week about taking it off. It was uncomfortable, itchy, and made him anxious and claustrophobic. But the doctors had discovered new spinal fractures in his neck, and he had not been given a choice. And after being yelled at by a burly night nurse I told him I would no longer be his accomplice in adjusting it after they left.

I happened to look over at him in his bed, about to sit next to him in our time alone together. and watched his body. I watched him breathe his last breath and then the absence of breathing again, and at that moment I saw what the books meant. He was gone. The person lying in the hospital bed wasn’t my husband, it was like a picture of him. Like a wax mold in one of Madame Tussauds’ museums. That’s when I ran to the bed and put my hand on his arm, his neck, his face. That’s when I realized I’d been lying and tried to take back everything I’d said.

“It’s just like he wanted,” the nurse told me, crying along with me. He’d waited until I took something for my ever-present anxiety. The Xanax I’d carried in my purse for months but never taken. I’d shared a funny picture of our daughter, Charlotte, and her uncle with the nurse. Charlotte had emptied out a plastic bin that wouldn’t hold more than 2 full paper towel rolls and wedged herself into it, leaning on her uncle on our couch to watch her movie.

“He heard you laughing, and knew you’d be okay,” she told me,” your laughing was the last thing he heard.”

But I wasn’t going to be okay. How could I ever be okay?

When I could stand by myself the nurse let me go. I leaned against his bed, and rested my head on his chest, staring at the bumps of his toes under the sheets. I silently willed him to breathe again. One last “just kidding!” to keep my own heart beating. I wished him to do one last thing no one would expect.

That’s when Ryan came back. Ryan was the man who’d introduced us, way back on a New Year’s Eve when we were all in college. My ex-boyfriend. Bob’s best man at our wedding. Our best friend.

I’d called him from another hospital on Monday last week in a panic since Bob wasn’t getting better and I didn’t know what to do. I’d taken the girls to daycare, gone into work for a few hours, and come into the hospital with a husband falling asleep at his lunch meal.

“What happened?” I asked one of the nurses when he’d woken up to be moved back to bed. Overnight he had been given Xanax along with his other medications, and it had been too strong for him. They needed to give him another medication to combat the Xanax, and then his body would eventually flush it out. But in the meantime, Bob would fall asleep mid-sentence. He could not stay awake. He wasn’t eating and wasn’t drinking. He had a strict salt and water regimen he had to live by since his cancer drained all his salt and he was constantly thirsty. No more than a liter of water a day, the doctor told us, and he took salt tablets too. Bob had no idea where he was or how much or little time had passed.

Another oncologist, one I hadn’t met, told me I should consider Comfort Care. Bob’s body was starting to fail. I had to start “making preparations.”

Last week he was walking, talking, and lifting up his children, and this week you’re telling me there’s nothing else we can do?

At about this time, Bob woke up from his current sleep. He saw me crying and asked what was wrong. I smiled at him and told him I would take care of it, I’d be alright. He nodded, squeezed my hand, and fell back asleep. I refused to answer the doctor and instead turned to the PA I had come to know over our many hospital stays.

“Tell me something. Anything. Tell me what we can do. He wouldn’t want this.”

She arranged for Bob to be moved to another hospital on the other side of the city. He would start radiation for the new spinal tumors they had found. That’s the thing we could do. I called Bob’s parents to tell them they needed to come to Syracuse. And then I called Ryan.

“Do you need me to come out?” Ryan asked when I called. No, I told him. Not yet. I knew somewhere deep that I would need him soon, and I didn’t want to waste days we didn’t have.

Ryan had come out on Friday and paid for a hotel room for three days that he didn’t sleep in once. The first night he’d slept over in our house to help me with the girls. A welcome distraction for them and a respite for me. Saturday night he and Bob’s other best friend, Dave, had promised to stay in the hospital since I had to go home. I had to go home. My phone was going to die. It only had 3% battery left and I had no charger. I had to go home. The girls’ Easter baskets hadn’t been made or hidden. I had to go home. My teenage cousins had been watching my kids all day after I’d said I’d be home around dinner. It was almost 10 p.m. when I finally parked in my driveway. I had to go home.

This night, Sunday night, the third night, Ryan had given the hotel keys to Bob’s parents, so they could try and rest a little and get some air outside of this hospital room.

“Ryan,” I said, making him look up from the door. He saw me laying on Bob’s chest.

“Fuck.” He’d tried to avoid this all day, my being alone when Bob died. But no one could dictate what Bob would do except Bob. And he’d waited until we were alone, just the two of us, and he’d heard me laughing.