Live to Tell

The sun has come up and I am standing by a window that has a beautiful view of downtown Boston. I reminisce at how much Boston has changed since I was a young man and how many of my memories belong to that city.

I turn from the window and all at once the scene before me is too much, I have to sit down. Despite the fact that I do not trust my knees and joints to last longer than ten minutes I have to sit because of my wife. She is in the hospital bed next to the uncomfortable armchair the nurses have set here for me.

She hasn’t moved in three weeks. The last time I saw her blue eyes seemed like ages ago, and the last time I heard her voice felt even longer than that.

I lean over, my spine stretching and groaning as I rest my elbows on the mattress. The noise of the heart monitor has become the only news station I watch. The outside world no longer matters to me—I could no longer pretend to care about the rest of the world.

I wrap my hand around hers—hers is cool compared to mine.

My thumb rubs back and forth against the back of her hand that is soft, as I have always known it to be. Aged though it is, it’s still the most beautiful hand I’ve ever been allowed to hold.

According to the heart monitor, everything is running smoothly in there. Her vitals have been stabilized since she was admitted but she had, unexplainably, slipped into a coma. The doctors didn’t know if it was possible for her to come out of it at her age. They assumed that due to her age she wouldn’t have the strength to fight.

But these doctors don’t know my wife.

I have always known the woman before me to be a fighter.

So here I sit, watching my wife connected to all of these different machines and think, not how this might end, but how it began.