He sits there for a while, looking at her. She is still beautiful. Her freckles have faded with the years, but her skin radiates warmth, moonlight bathing the contours of her face. Her hair, silver now, softly falls all around the pillowcase. Her emerald eyes, magnetic as always, pulls him to the first time he had seen her—in college, in Professor Mangum’s Freshman English class. He remembers her eyes and her voice, resonant as she recited Shakespeare:
As you were when first, your eye I eyed,
Such seems your beauty still.
She was a young girl, filled with excitement and wonder. Her laughter filled the gloomiest day with sunshine. Her radiant smile warmed his life. He had never seen a face so expression filled, ever changing like ocean waves.
Her body athletic, firm and well proportioned, stomach flat, legs tanned, reflected health and feminine strength. When he wrapped his arms around her body, she seemed to melt into his, summoning sensations of soft snow falling. Her kisses opened the door to heaven.
A bird starts to sing outside the window, and he turns his head. Outside the rolling lawns shaded by towering oaks, make life seem secure somehow. He sits there quietly, enjoying nature’s beauty with her.
He marvels at the privilege of being married to her for 43-years. He is grateful for the steadiness of her love and her support, even when his mistakes were unsupportable.
He remembers her hugely pregnant; her long and difficult labor that had him worried, and the doctor too. The sudden x-rays “just to check if her pelvis is big enough.” The pain she experienced standing and twisting to the instructions of the technician as the contractions intensified.
After the delivery and she was tucked in warm and safe, he walked back to their apartment numb from the ordeal, crying softly for her and her suffering. He was trying to study for the Medical Board exam scheduled that afternoon when a call came from the hospital. She was bleeding. He ran back to find her pale and clammy. He felt guilty—Why did he leave so soon? He knelt beside her bed, praying. Emergency surgery was scheduled. A small section of placenta extracted. The danger had passed.
Now the menace is different, a slow, progressive slide into oblivion. An aide enters the room to take vital signs and fluff the pillow, interrupting his thoughts. As she leaves, he recalls his flight surgeon days, the vertical power of the F-4 Phantom, over the top, negative Gs. The thrill of riding the helicopter hoist to help those below. The daily adrenalin rush. He had ignored her needs then and she began to pull away, becoming more independent. Sadly, she placed second during the years of medical specialization, the pleasures of academia, and the demands of medical practice. Worldly things made him less considerate to her needs, never knowing how much she needed his attention, and he, hers.
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers…
We have given our hearts away.
Making money and buying things. Ambition. Competition. Wanting it all. More recognition. Bigger cars. Larger homes. The best schools. Trying to beat everybody else at everything. All these things get into the way of what is most important—loving those we care about.
A crisis. Then a coming together with a better understanding of needs they each had. As was his bent, he remembers other ways that he had let her down and had disappointed her.
He looks at her. She smiles peacefully. He asks if she remembers walking in the Angelina County rain, drive-in movies Friday night, country summer evenings, the first time he told her he loved her, sitting together after Caribbean lunches, sunset sails, walks along Carolina Beach. She doesn’t.
He tells her about their trips to tennis tournaments with the kids; reading out loud together; kneeling for nighttime prayers, mountain cabin excursions, board games with the family, card games together—how she always seemed to edge him out in the end.
He reminds her of riding the jeep on mountain road switchbacks and campfire ghost stories—the Battery Beast, Chug Houndlicker, the Ditch-dog Killer, Gunner Shellachumm. She smiles at his enthusiasm, but the stories fail to register.
He tells how she laughed when on a canoe portage she fell, the backpack pressing her, turtle-like, into the mud before he ran to help her. He laughs about their first fight when he couldn’t get the wet wood to light. As a last resort, he tore their hiking map throwing it on the kindling. Finally, the fire started, but she refused to let him grill the hamburger patties because “they had been out too long.” She remembers none of it.
He told her about the basketball games. She would yell loudly for their team, but when it got to crunch time and the game was close, she would hide her eyes with every shot, asking, “What happened?” Ditto for movies. In the scary parts, she always hid her eyes. He would kid her and suggest that they request a ticket rebate because she only saw half the movie.
She shivers slightly. He stands and pulls the covers over her shoulders. Returning to the bedside chair he remembers the mornings when he would make the coffee, and bring it to her in bed where they would talk of prayers and promises, their family and friends, their children and their hopes.
Gradually, they learned the value of putting God first in their lives, and, paradoxically, when they did so, they became closer. When their children left the state for prospects elsewhere, they became almost inseparable. Friendships became more abundant and more intimate.
He considers her biggest fault—one of her few faults. The fault that bothered him the most was this: She never told him what she wanted. She never asked him to do something for her. Because he got the most joy out of giving her joy, he would have given her anything she wanted. But she never told him what she wanted. “You should know,” she said.
He remembered her father’s funeral when he learned something about her that he had never known before. At the wake she had said:
My father was such a wonderful man. He had integrity. He was loyal. A good provider. Understanding. He allowed me to make small mistakes that taught me life lessons, while standing firm on rules and regulations that kept me out of real trouble.
It seems strange, but one thing he did keeps returning to my mind. Every Valentine’s Day he gave me a box of chocolates. That gift of chocolates came every year, as certain as the sun rising.
Chocolate? He didn’t understand what made her father’s gift so special. In contrast to his father-in-law who gave chocolates, he was a “candy-is-dandy-but-liquor-is-quicker” man, a fast track guy. Run for a gift at last minute, charming the clerk to wrap it. What’s the big deal about chocolate? He was clueless.
Months later at a party, the discussion turned to chocolate—the flavors—dark chocolate, milk chocolate—chocolate with names he had never heard discussed, chocolate imported from Europe and Asia! My goodness!
From then on every Valentine’s Day, he bought her big boxes of chocolates, lots of boxes. He overdid it, she said. Finally, he learned the chocolates that were special to her. Thereafter she got her special chocolates, the ones she liked the most “in the whole wide world.” Her happiness warmed his heart.
A rain taps tiny drops gently on the windowpane, bringing his thoughts back to the present. He reaches down. He takes a red package out of a gift bag. He places the package on the nightstand.
She looks at it.
“What is it?” she asks.
“Chocolates.”
“Chocolates. I love chocolates, don’t I?
“Yes,” he says.
“David?” she says. “David. You’re David aren’t you.”
“Yes,” he says.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “I didn’t know who you were and I was afraid to ask. I was afraid I would hurt you. You were so kind to me, but I couldn’t remember who you were. David… David…I’m afraid I will forget who you are again.”
“You remember who I am now,” he says.
Slowly he gets out of his chair. He goes to her bed. He lowers the bedrails and lies beside her. He wraps his arms around her body. She seems to melt into his, summoning sensations of soft snow falling.
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