About 9:30 on Tuesday night, I posted this to my French food group:
Dinner tonight: crackers, an apple and some grapes, things brought by friends to our room at the Hospice an ambulance delivered us to five days ago. Bob had been under home hospice care since March 12th but the time had come for his final journey, and I'm able to stay here with him around the clock. Food doesn't interest me, though there's a chef here who provides soup and cookies daily; I only eat because hunger is uncomfortable. Bob stopped eating nine days ago.
He wasn't expected to last this long, and it's not over yet.
As I look ahead--not forward, just ahead--to widowhood, I wonder how I'll learn to cook for one. 39 years of cooking for two has shaped my entire existence. Even last week--my last trip out for groceries--I reflexively picked up a bunch of five or six bananas then broke down as I remembered with a jolt that they were only for me now. I put three back.
Widowhood. Others are doing it. Most recently Patricia's doing it. I'll pay attention. I'll learn. I'll try hard to not fall into that easy abyss of frozen peas and take-out tamales as I waddle around in that big empty house. I'll cuddle up with my cat, fry the occasional pork chop and somehow find purpose again even if one not half as noble as trying to make Bob Stone feel like the luckiest man alive.
Truth is, I was the lucky one.
He died three hours later.