Empathy and the un-unsaid

I was so angry, so pissed off at her dying, on her journey toward death because it did not go as I expected. A death neatly tied up, a happy-sad occasion of bedside confessions and the expression of undying love, where before there was silence. That was not what this was.

And in my selfish wish for something different, it was not lost on me that she too was angry. Because she was not ready. She was indignant that her life was ending when she still had so many things to do.

Maybe I mistook her indifference to me, and in her insistence that I had poisoned her water, that I wanted her dead, Maybe this lashing out was her resistance to the final chapter of her life story.

I sat with her. Through stormy silence, furtive and downright mean side-eyed glares, as her body tightened and closed.

I sat with her through it all. Rubbed her back when the pain from the blood that slowly leaked from her aorta into her thoracic cavity caused intractable pain. And betrayal.

"I'm not ready," she insisted. And she wasn't until she was.

And when she was ready she looked me in the eyes, determined and sad. Unwilling to give in but knowing that she had to. That although her mind was strong and able, her heart could not go on, and she said, "I am ready to go now". And with those words, her skin cooled, her breath became irregular and quiet, and her heart rate dropped, 45...30...20 until nothing but calm silence surrounded us.