Earth to Heaven

By TAD BARTIMUS

It was a spontaneous gesture; later, my friend would wonder where the words came from as she spoke them while standing beside the canned peas in the general store:

"Why don't you come out to the cottage for the weekend? There's a beautiful view and it's very quiet."

The wife replied: "We'd like that." Her dying husband nodded.

My friend didn't know the couple except to smile and say hello, they were people she saw here and there. She'd heard they didn't have much money; there'd been a fundraiser when his cancer was diagnosed. I remembered buying a grilled chicken, putting $10 in the donation jar and vaguely wondering what else I could do. Then I'd gone about my own life.

There was just wind and rain, his wife, a few friends who stopped by, a visiting nurse nearby who obtained special permission to administer morphine.

Not my friend. Later, I thought hard about this. Who in their right mind would invite a terminally ill stranger to be a houseguest? Why get involved, isn't there liability? And if he was that sick, why wasn't he out of sight? This is the '90s, the era of ER, hospice, Dr. Kervorkian. Clinical and institutional involvement is touted as the way to go, rubber gloves to the end and here's the bill.

My friend didn't analyze the situation. Social norms, conventional wisdom and selfish practicality are not her style. Instead, she took another emotional growth spurt and spoke from her heart"Why don't you come?"

Besides, she said later, she didn't actually think he was dying; after all, he'd been standing upright in the grocery store, next to the peas, talking.

When the couple arrived he looked much worse, causing my friend to worry about being an hour away from a doctor and "off the grid." The cottage was powered by wind generators, with water flowing by gravity directly >from a stream into the house pipes. But she decided she could cope. After all, she'd birthed cows and kids. Besides, tomorrow the couple would be gone.

Perhaps it was the place's beauty and solitude; no beeping monitors, no respirators, no bustling nurses or doctors striding importantly about. There was just wind and rain, his wife, a few friends who stopped by, a visiting nurse nearby who obtained special permission to administer morphine.

My friend had just gone to sleep in her house when he died. Moments earlier she'd been one of the rotating caregivers; a privilege, she said. Yes, there had been sadness. But there was also a sense of witnessing a momentous event:

"One minute you'd think he was with you, the next you'd think he was gone. Then he would take another ragged breath and you'd touch his hand and it would still be warm and you'd wonder at the miracle of it, his crossing over into a place where we couldn't follow."

My friend called the mortician, then she got a blanket a well-loved one her children had used and they wrapped him in it. The long driveway down the hillside was a river of mud, a four-wheel-drive truck the only option. The pickup's bed was filthy so a clean blue tarp, originally bought to cover the barbecue, became a waterproof shroud. The dead man's widow, the neighbor who was a nurse, and two others who'd just stopped by to visit but wound up staying to the end, cradled the body as my friend drove her slipping, sliding truck to the rendezvous with the hearse.

After the corpse was lovingly delivered to the undertaker the others dispersed. Back in the cottage, my friend sat alone on the edge of the bed she'd offered and looked out through huge, open windows toward a new moon and a bucketful of stars. A dying man's last view. Earth to heaven.

She waved.

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