The stretcher wouldn’t make the turns up our narrow Tudor stairs, so the funeral home owners had to carry my husband down in their arms. “Do you have a bedsheet we could use?” they had asked. They would return it to me, washed, they said.
I had washed my husband’s body an hour before: the hospice nurse directing me, rinsing the washcloth in our bathroom sink and bringing it back for me to take his hand in my hand and slowly push the plushness up from his wrist to the deficit in his shoulder. Doctors had taken his trapezius muscle many months before, in hopes of keeping the cancer from spreading. But tumors had already rooted into the lining of his lungs.
The flowers on the bedsheet bloomed bright orange, roses with thorns, their green leaves stretching like hands hoping to be held. My husband’s body had been shrinking over time, but I knew he was still heavy. His middle section dipped down, folding the flowers into bouquets, until the two men hefted him onto their stretcher at the bottom of the stairs.
He would be burned and given back to me. The sheet would be returned, folded neatly in a bag and placed on our porch. I could not bear to keep it. I hope a stranger found it at the thrift store and sleeps beneath its blooms, holding someone’s hand, ignorant that death will come for everyone they love.
Victoria Windsor is a children’s librarian and admirer of often unappreciated things, like lichen and snails and unfurled ferns. She has an MFA in creative writing from Texas State University. Victoria’s life, like anyone else’s, overflows with grief and joy. She is currently finding the courage to look back at ten years of widowhood and the cancer that came before it at tenpastdeath.substack.com.
Image Credit: Flickr Creative Commons/Tara
