I know the right word is “widower” but everyone turns into a girl when the person they love most dies. Their bodies get small and they make small sounds. They don’t know what to do.
Everyone dying turns into a girl too. Their eyes get surprised and wide and they look at you like “What?” but you don’t know.
We were all at the hospice to help Julie die. The three of us, her husband Bob and Tony and I, had been there all along, and Brian was coming up from California because we told him we thought it would be soon. Brian had been made a widow too, back in the ’90s when Jim died. Julie and Bob had taken Brian out a lot after that, to dinner at a new place every week, to shows and movies, etc. The rest of us had lost people too but only friends or family, not our mate. So if anyone knew what it was like, that would be Brian. Plus, in the past few years, Brian had gotten a new, good life. He’d met a great guy, another great guy we all adored, and he and the guy, Eric, had adopted a kid and moved to California and gotten married.
When people get close their bodies get light, like sticks or wadded-up paper, and you can move their limbs like a doll. Their heads don’t, though, their heads mostly stay the same, but heavier somehow, and harder without their hair or only baby hair where it was starting to grow back. You can learn how to move their bodies, you lift them slowly and tell them what you are doing, I’m lifting your arm, your leg, I’m putting my arm behind your back and I am going to pull you up, I’m turning you on your side. But their heads are so heavy, like a rock, but covered with something thin and tearable that you can feel when you lift it up to plump the pillow or change the sheets or straighten the neck, if it is bent, to help them swallow or if they are trying to say something or look at you.
Sometimes you looked away from them and when you looked back their whole face looked like teeth like they were almost already a skull.
Bob and Tony and I were there the last few nights whereas before most nights there had been only one. My girlfriend Chris had to work so she went home to sleep then went to work then came back after. The three of us stayed except to take turns to go home to change and shower. We’d lie on the couch or on one of the big chairs in the waiting room and try to sleep until whoever was with her would come out and say could you spell them and you would. In the waiting room sometimes you were two, but sometimes only one because you needed to walk around. There was the hall and the nurses’ station, with the night nurse behind his computer and the light from his computer screen that made his face look blue and he’d look up and smile kindly and ask if there was anything he could do although there wasn’t.
There were the stairs and the elevator and other floors and the woman at the front desk, Jeanine, who I had known back when all the guys were dying during the epidemic, or you could take a small chair from the waiting room into the hall where it was always light and try to read or sit there with your eyes closed.
When Julie had gone in they’d said it might be a few days, but it was weeks, and one of those last nights I went to Jeanine and said, “She just keeps hanging on…” There was something in my voice that I felt bad about, but there it was. “She’s still driving that boat,” Jeanine had said. “I know,” I’d said, ashamed, but glad I had been about to say it out loud to someone. “It’ll get over,” she said and I said yeah.
Sometimes you’d look and it was like their eyes were gone, like no one was inside them anymore.
I’d gone with her to doctors’ appointments and chemo and the hospital a lot. Bob had to work; he could have taken more time off, they understood and were kind to him, but he needed to. He needed to do something besides take care of her, which he did all the time, especially at night, which no one else did, which he told me once, but never again, when she was sick or out of her head or he had to give her fluids or nutrition or clean her up. Some of us had offered to help but they didn’t want it.
I work mostly at my desk, and I can take my computer anywhere so I could be a lot with her. I’d meet her at chemo after she’d been dropped off, or when she was in the hospital I’d get there in the morning and I’d bring coffee and muffins and the Times and Bob and I would read it aloud to us all and drink coffee and then he’d go to home to shower and then to work and I would stay with her.
Other people came and went so I got to come and go too. She slept and listened to books on tape a lot. I talked about what I was working on and sometimes she’d get a book on tape about whatever that was and we would talk about that. She wanted to talk about other things, she told me more than once, and that she needed to laugh. But sometimes we didn’t say anything at all.
One time at the hospital they were doing the checkout to send her home and she started going not right in her head. They said she was fine to go home but Bob said did she have to. The nurse looked at Bob and found a room and gave me a box of Kleenex and Bob and I went into the room and he broke down. I don’t know what to do, he said, I don’t know what to do anymore.
They let her stay in the hospital another couple days and then a room opened up and she went to the hospice. By then she and Bob had talked and she had decided. He hated, he told me afterward, that she had decided that; he’d wanted her to be home. But she didn’t want to be “a burden” to him; he hated the word, he said, because she would never be, but she didn’t want him to have it at home or worry so she went in.
One time at the hospice when she had to go to the hospital so they could drain off fluid, the way they’d done a few times before, it wouldn’t drain. I’d gone with her—they’d driven us there in a medical van, it was late in the afternoon—and all of us were shooting the breeze, the doc and the nurse and the tech guys, we all knew each other by then—until her doctor said to me, Let’s go outside. So he and I went out in the hall and he said it wasn’t just fluid anymore, it wasn’t something you could drain. I called Bob and told him and he said he’d meet us back at the hospice as soon as he could—he usually stopped for dinner on the way—then her doc and I went back in the room and he told her.
I sat in the back of the medical van as they drove her back to the hospice. She lay on the med bed partially strapped and partially hooked and the cute young med tech guys flirted outrageously with her. She rolled her eyes and dished it back and I said she was shameless, an incorrigible tramp, a hussy, etc., and that I would have to tell poor Bob. But then as soon as we all stopped laughing she looked terrified. I took her hand and we sat and said nothing the rest of the way while the guys fiddled with the machines.
We took turns in the waiting room and with her in her room.
We turned out the waiting-room lights to sleep and there were shades you could pull down but light still came in and around the slats so it felt like it was never really night, like you were waiting and waiting for something that never came. But later you realized it had because the light went from less to more and the shade from dark to beige to pink then bright and then you realized there were parts you could not remember, you must have slept, and that sounds of the morning were beginning.
There were cars and buses, etc. outside and inside trays with metal clanking and smells of steam and food. There was the squeaking of peoples’ shoes in the hall and people who said good morning and the smell of coffee.
In the mornings we traded off to go home then came back.
I walked home and had a coffee and a shower and changed. I’d get something for me and the boys at the bakery across the street when I went back. I sat on the couch; my hair was wet. I sat with the cat and pulled his ears, which he loved; he purred and gave me little tiny bites.
After a while, I went out to water the lawn. I was standing there with the hose when Tony drove up. He usually walked. He didn’t get out of the car but said I should come. I’m watering the lawn, I said. He said Bob said I should come. I’ll finish the lawn, I said, and he said, No, now, and I then heard him. I turned off the water and shut the house and got in the car and we drove back and nothing had happened.
Whatever it was, the raggedly breath or juddering, that noise she made, had stopped, and she was quiet and looked asleep.
Bob looked like himself but also not, like he’d shrunk into a girl but also he was sweaty and needed a shave.
Her head on the pillow was calm and still. Her mouth was slightly open and you could see the movement of air on her lips whenever she breathed. She looked very young but also something else.
Sometimes they lie with their mouth ajar which makes it hard to swallow, so sometimes you touch them beneath the chin, to see if it closes easily, then close it to make it easier for them and also for the dryness of the lips. You also can put things on the lips, like Vaseline or lip stuff. Also you can put things in the mouth, a Q-tip type thing with moisture so they can suck.
A few nights before my mother died, one of the home hospice nurses—we had been able to keep her at home—told us that sometimes the last gift that a mother gives her kid is not to die in front of them. She doesn’t want you to be the one to have to remember that. Sometimes they prefer to die alone or with someone else who won’t be so destroyed.
She lasted longer than anyone thought. You can’t believe how long they can when they’ve been off their fluids and everything for days. It’s like doing it is very hard, like even if they want to, if they’re “ready” the way some people like to say, it takes a long, long time, it’s very hard, it’s labor.
Sometimes we turned on the TV and sort of watched but without the sound. She’d liked it when all of us together could watch a movie (early Woody Allen, Mad Max, etc.) with popcorn and beer or Gatorade, then later when she was sleeping more, she said she wanted us all to watch, but she’d doze in and out and sometimes when her eyes were closed, the sound would seem to upset her, but she still didn’t want us to turn it off, so we kept it on and watched without the sound. We watched and the soundtrack was popcorn and beer and the drip and breath. Sometimes you’d look around and see that everyone’s eyes were closed.
Chris was able to leave work early—they had been being really good to her—so she came down and she and I were there with the boys. Bob hadn’t left to shower or check in at home or leave at all. A while after Chris was there, Brian said to Tony and Bob, “Let’s go for a walk.” Bob waved, like, Okay, go. “No, us,” said Brian. He meant the boys. “Come on,” he said and stood and Tony stood too but Bob didn’t. “Come on,” Brian said again and made this shooing motion at Bob. “You’re coming with us,” he said, and he looked at Bob who looked at him for a second then stood and then they went.
When Bob and Tony were in the hall, Brian turned back and touched my elbow and said, “We’re going out for a long one.” He told the nurse they were all going out and the nurse said that was good.
Then Chris and I were in the room with her.
We sat by the bed and held her hand. First one of us for a while and then the other. We’d change our seats to be the closer one, then pass her hand to the other so someone was always holding it.
After a while Chris said, “It’s getting cold,” and I said, “No, it’s not.” She gave me the hand and I said, “It’s not,” and then she said to me, “Honey.”
“It’s warm,” I said, and it was still warm, from where she had been holding it, but the places she hadn’t she put my other hand and then I could feel the rest was getting cold.
Chris put her hand to Julie’s face and said it was cooling, too. I put my hand on Julie’s cheek and held it there.
She was still breathing, we thought, and maybe there was a pulse. We didn’t want to look too close or stare like waiting for what but also we didn’t want to look away and then look back.
There wasn’t a movement or different breath or cry, there wasn’t a moment. There was only a while when her mouth wasn’t moving, the sheet above her not moving too, the gradual getting cold. I went to the nurse and he came and looked and felt then got out his stethoscope then stood for a minute then put it away and said, “You’ll want to tell him before he comes back in the room.”
“Okay,” I said and the nurse called down to Jeanine and said to phone us when Bob and the boys got onto the elevator.
He left us and we sat by the bed and waited.
When the phone rang I jumped and Chris answered it and I went to meet the elevator.
When the door slid open they saw me and didn’t say anything. They stood there until the door began closing then Brian stopped it with his hand and they got out.
“She’s gone,” I said. “I know,” Bob said, “I knew when I saw you there,” and we walked back to the room.
We waited in the hall while he went in, then Chris came out and we left him alone and went to the terrace to wait.
Outside it was a beautiful day, all sunny and warm and light. We stood outside in the beautiful day and waited for the widow. 
Rebecca Brown, a novelist, essayist, and Stranger Genius Award winner, first read this piece at the Humanities Washington dinner. She will be reading with Mary Ewald at New City Theater November 22–23 and 29–30, and will be presenting on monsters at Northwest Film Forum December 5–7. If you’ve never seen her speak before, go.