Like a balloon suddenly unknotted, my lips released the stress of the previous week. Oddly, a celebratory feeling settled in, magnifying the words I read over and over: Carol died today at 3:27 PM, surrounded by her family, as she had wished.
The entirety of the week had been weighed down by prediction, “today, maybe tomorrow.” My worry about her suffering gave way to anger that death should come so slowly: two weeks without food and barely two cups of water. How does a body cling to life with so little? When I made what would be my final visit, she didn’t recognize me, just as she hadn’t the two or three times before. She graced me with a few moments of consciousness; her last word “water.”
Rain fell the following day, quenching the thirst of a community ravaged by drought. I hoped the storm’s force would be a catalyst to end the electrical activity of her damaged brain and bring permanence to the loss of her body. But the universe reminded me none of us is so powerful as to will death and the end would not come until the eve of May’s full moon. Just as its energy pulled the tides to and from earth’s shore, the moon pulled Carol’s last breath from her lungs and cast her spirit into the illuminated sky. Now each month, those of us who loved her will gaze upward at a night sky to search for that opal moon, while a cool breeze caresses a cheek or shoulder as if kissed by an old friend, and we will remember.
