The Day He Asked For Divorce Was The Day I Was Dying Chapter 9

The days that followed moved slowly.

Sam went to work, did his rounds, and performed surgeries.

His coworkers noticed he had lost weight, and the dark circles under his eyes wouldn’t go away. When someone asked, he said he wasn’t sleeping well.

No one at the hospital knew I had died. I had lived quietly. I left the same way.

He started having trouble sleeping, not the kind where he lay awake all night, but the kind where he would drift off and then jerk awake, stabbed by a single memory, a single sentence.

He would remember some small thing, some detail he had overlooked.

He remembered the last time I came home from an errand, carrying a pot of white camellias.

He looked up the meaning of the flower. It wasn’t “devoted love,” as the florist had said. It was

“unrequited love.” A love that would never be returned.

He remembered me saying, “Will you take a look at me?”

A patient with late-stage cancer, asking her husband for something close to a plea. And he had

picked up his phone and gone to another woman.

If he had stayed that day and reached out to feel my stomach. With his experience, he would have

noticed something wrong.

The mass in the abdomen, the swollen lymph nodes, those signs couldn’t fool a surgeon who had

been operating for twelve years.

But he had left without a second thought.

In November, Margaret sent a package from her house.

Sam signed for it, carried the box into the living room, and sat with it for a long time before opening

Inside were my things from the hospice room, packed by the aide. An old jacket, a few books, and a

spare phone.

The battery was nearly dead.

Sam found a charger, plugged it in, turned it on, and went to the photo album.

There weren’t many pictures.

The most recent one was of the sycamore tree outside my hospital window Most of the leaves hat turned yellow.

I had added a caption to the photo: [Beautiful day today. Good day to go home.)

The date was two days before I died.

That day, the doctor had said my condition was too advanced to keep pushing. But I had stared out the window for a long time, like I was waiting for a day when I could go home.

He scrolled back. There was a picture of our kitchen. The cast iron pot was on the stove, with beef and potatoes on a cutting board beside it. The timestamp was eleven o’clock at night.

I had taken a picture of the pot in the dark kitchen.

That must have been the night I made the last pot of stew. After it finished cooking, I filled the

thermos and waited for him to come home.

And when he walked in, his first words were, “Get the stew. Juliette wants it.”

Sam turned off the phone and put it back in the box.

Outside, it started to snow. Winter had come early that year.

He walked to the closet and took out the unopened box with the heated knee brace. Inside the box

was a small card that came with it from the store.

On the back of the card, I had written a few words: [Don’t just wear dress pants in the winter. Put on long underwear. You won’t listen to me. Listen to your knees.] *

Sam put on the brace and sat down on the edge of the bed.

The heat was on in the house, but he was shivering.

Every winter, I used to turn on the electric blanket before he came to bed. When he slipped under

the covers, the sheets were already warm.

He had assumed it was the furnace. He had never thought about the fact that someone turned it on

an hour before he came home.

Now the bed was cold. Cold like my final temperature.