Blood and Bacon

            “She up there on the steps, Officer,” a black woman in a yellow washdress said, pointing at a pealing porch, her hair a mass of pink sponge rollers that looked like sausages.
            “She bad cut up!”
            Lopez’s shirt was sticking to him where his back had rested against the leather seat in the patrol car on this hot, sticky night near Candlestick Park in South San Francisco. He could see the lights blooming above the park and he thought briefly of the tickets for the game tonight his brother had offered, which he couldn’t use because it was his shift and he needed the money. His back itched as he pulled the shirt away and went up to the dirty, white frame house. His new partner, Sutter, also black but tall and thin where Lopez was short and overweight, followed. Lopez thought Sutter seemed calm, composed, although he didn’t know him well. They had only been partners for two months, after Lopez’s partner was shot in a burglary arrest turned murder near the airport. It was hard getting used to being with a new man in a situation where you had to have each other’s back. They were investigating what sounded like yet another murder, called in by a hysterical female who wouldn’t give her name. Driving by the address, they saw a few people standing around and got out to investigate when the woman in the washdress pointed to the porch.
            Lopez and Sutter pushed through the group of people to where a young, black woman lay, her limbs grotesquely bent underneath her on the steps. She was slight, pretty and sad, her stockings rolled down to her knees in the heat, dressed in a black sundress that barely covered her ample breasts. There was a deep knife wound in her stomach that poured blood out and down the steps. She groaned.
            Sutter bent down and tore the blood-soaked dress away. The wound was large where a knife had ripped her open.
            “Good God Almighty!” Lopez screamed. Get some packing and call for a bus. She doesn’t have much time.
            “How about moving back folks,” Sutter said, pushing against the crowd as he went back out to the car. “Go on home. We’ve got it.” Nobody moved. Lopez pushed the wound together, trying to stop the bleeding.
            Through a screen door, he could hear a TV and conversation. He turned the woman’s face and her eyes opened slightly.
            “Who did this to you? What’s his name?” Lopez asked softly. The woman’s eyes moved, looking at a spider on the step move slowly away, and then closed and opened. She didn’t answer and seemed already in some other place.
            “Joe Foster”, said the woman in the yellow washdress and curlers, “but he gone home.”
            Sutter was back carrying the bandages and they packed the gaping wound. There wasn’t much to her and she had lost a lot of blood. He and Lopez lifted her down to the bottom of the steps so she could lay flat. She still had a pulse, but was breathing heavily. Where was the ambulance? It was probably too late for her.
            “You stay here until the bus gets here,” he told Sutter. “I’m going inside, see if I can find out who did this.”  He drew his revolver reluctantly, tired of trying to stop people from hurting each other. Half a dozen blacks were watching a ball game. The Dodgers were leading the Giants 4-2 in the fifth. Lopez recognized one of the women, Cora Bailey. He’d arrested her for prostitution a few weeks back. She saw him and got up off the floor, where she had been leaning against a chair, and straightened her dress.
            “What the fuck you want?” said a lanky shirtless man, crunching his beer can in one hand. “This ball game sucks anyway.” Everybody else was watching the game and didn’t look up. The reception turned snowy and the shirtless man got up to adjust the aerial. “God-damned TV”, he said and opened another beer from the 12-pack on the floor.
            “Where is Joe Foster?” Lopez asked, keeping the gun pointed down at his side. It was hot on this August night. A dented, noisy fan spun the air uselessly. He could feel the sweat running down inside his shirt over his ample belly, which bulged above his belt.
            Cora looked over at him, the whites of her eyes showing against her dark skin.
            “In there,” she said, jerking her thumb over her shoulder. “What you want him for?”
            “He cut up the lady out there?”
            “Oh yeah, she OK?” Cora didn’t seem upset. Was it always this way, a violent death a part of the day as unremarkable as the next beer? They hadn’t noticed that Lopez had a gun.
            “Not really,” he answered, but Cora had already turned back to the TV and wasn’t listening. Halicki had just struck out Garvey and all eyes were on the screen.
            There was noise from a room in the back and Lopez followed it. Foster was there in the kitchen, an oily, smelly place with a bare light bulb and peeling flowered wallpaper. He was frying bacon. It was shriveled in the pan and the grease popped and burned. A six-pack with three left and one open sat on the counter.
            Foster, a big man, naked to the waist and sweaty, lit a cigarette and tended the bacon. There was perspiration running down the sides of his face, but he didn’t seem nervous about anything other than his frying pan. Lopez looked around the dirty room, the garbage can was overflowing and flies buzzed around. A clean knife lay in a pan in the sink.
            “There’s a lady outside all cut up,” said Lopez, staring at him and trying to read his reaction. There wasn’t any.  “You use this?” He picked up the knife with his handkerchief, the water dripping on the floor. There wasn’t any blood on it, but Foster could have washed it off.
            “What lady?” Foster answered, the cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. He didn’t look at Lopez.
            “The one bleeding on the porch”.
            “Didn’t cut her. Just trying to fry some bacon here, and its getting burned.”
            Sutter walked into the kitchen, his upper lip rising at the mess and smell of the place.
            “Ambulance is here,” he said calmly. “They don’t think she’ll make it to the hospital.”
            “Cuff him,” growled Lopez, raising his gun up to point at Foster. “You have the right to remain silent. You are not required to say anything to us at any time or answer any questions.” Foster didn’t look angry. In fact, he had no affect at all.
            “Where you taking me?” he asked as they started out. “Bacons all burned.” Lopez turned off the stove and moved the skillet back. He wrapped the knife in his handkerchief.
            “45th.” Sutter answered grabbing his arm. “Why’d you go after her?”
            “She my woman. He was feeling her all over. Not no more, not no more.” It was as though cutting her was a way of expressing simple disapproval.
            The stretcher was being rolled out to the ambulance as they walked to the squad car. Foster looked down at the still form under the blanket.            
            “She done. I got him, too.”
Lopez and Sutter looked at each other knowing the night was just beginning.
            “Put him in the car. I’m going back inside to ask some questions,” Lopez said. He opened the back and put the knife into an envelope, then headed back inside where the Dodgers were still ahead in the 9th and no one saw anything.
            “Went to the store for some cigs and beer and she just laying there,” said one.
            “I didn’t see nothing since Joshua’s single,” says another.
            “What’s all the fuss and questions,” asks the lanky black. His legs draped over a torn chair, he popped another can of beer.
            “You shut up!” said Cora, “Leave him be. These people just doing their job.”  She needed points for the next time she was arrested.
            “What’s her name? The lady who got cut?” Lopez asked with everyone staring at the TV.
            “Don’t know,” said a woman, pregnant and sunk into a chair, her dirty legs spread out to make herself cooler. “Bernie, Beanie, no that ain’t it.” And she looked back to the TV.
            “Cora?” Lopez asked firmly.
            “Name is Bernice Brown, lives up to Daly City. Comes down sometimes.”
            “Shut up!” somebody said. The Giants had just scored in the bottom of the 9th. “They finally movin.”
            Lopez shrugged. It was a bad night. Just too hot. He wasn’t going to get anymore here. And what they were holding back wouldn’t put the lady’s gut back together. He slammed the screen door and stood on the porch looking down at the red stain on the step. He wondered if anyone would wash it off. The ambulance siren faded in the distance.
            “Oh shit,” somebody said inside as Thomasson grounded out to end the game.
            Lopez walked slowly out to the squad car where Foster sat in the back, silent and handcuffed. Sutter was listening to the radio crackling, giving an address to another patrol.
‘Yes,’ he thought. Sutter’s calm and quiet might be a good change. Lopez sighed and started the car.
 

In Rememberance

My Grandfather Andy’s house stood on a large lot out on East Henderson in Cleburne, Texas. The dry, grey Bermuda grass grew coarse and prickly, crowding its edge, pushing the small white frame box upward, making it seem solitary and alone. I was seven that summer, and having visited there many times, thought I knew the house, its musty smells and antique shapes, and its occupant who was my Dad’s father. But whatever it is about some summers that awakens curiosity in you, that was me then, waking and yawning, seeing that house for the first time, really feeling it, or maybe realizing it would be important to remember.
            The grass hurt my feet and there were burrs, so I wore shoes outside, but never inside the house. None of the children did. The floor was always cool and smooth, kept clean by Mrs. Glasser, who lived next door and came once a week to clean for Granddad. The porch in front had white railings and two rocking chairs, only one of which was comfortable, its brown padded arms worn through by elbows propping up a newspaper. Granddad sat there in the afternoons as the liquid heat creeped up the steps and into the house, which had no air-conditioning. He was getting on and his eyes were now rheumy and not working so well, but he would still tell us stories, while we sat on the steps and he rocked back and forth in that brown wicker rocker, about when he first came to Texas and began to work in the flour mill. His mother, Marion, had lived across the street with Lizzie, her youngest daughter. My Great-Grandmother Marion was by all accounts a formidable woman who now stared down sternly from a picture above Granddad’s bed. No one ever talked about my Grandmother Mary Martin.
            There were three children there that summer, myself and Claudia and Ethyl, Uncle Claude and Aunt Gerta’s girls. The three of us slept on pallets in the east bedroom, and our parents in the two double beds. They were large brass ones with plump mattresses and featherbeds, which my mother laid aside on hot summer nights. There was a chifferobe with Granddad’s clothes, a heavy old dressing table higher on the edges than in the middle with a wavy mirror, and a trunk, an old wood trunk. I thought about that trunk a lot. No one ever opened it and I asked Mother once what was inside.
            “Never you mind,” she’d said, “Just some old things that belonged to your Grandmother Mary Martin.” And with that she would begin to be busy having me do something else, like take a bath in the huge ball-footed tub. When I sat down in it, I couldn’t see over the top and I always felt like I was going to go down the drain with the water and no one would notice. The bathroom floor had settled and spilled water ran into a corner where the linoleum had peeled up.
            We ate in the enormous square dining room at a round table served by a large buffet with a marble top and hat racks where Granddad kept his tobacco. There was a trunk in this room, too, but it was full of books. I was with my father one day when he was looking in this trunk for a textbook. There was some piano music and I asked him about it, because there was no piano in the house.
            “It belonged to Mother, your Grandmother Mary Martin.” Then he stopped to look at me. “She did love to play the piano,” he said wistfully. The pages were yellow and crumbly on the edges.
            “Where is she?” The question startled him. At first he looked angry and then his face fell, making lines in his cheeks and forehead. He touched my arm.
            “She went away, a very long time ago,” he said softly. And then I was sent outside to play with the other girls under the pecan trees. They weren’t interested in trunks.
            We stayed there a week that summer and I never stopped thinking about the trunk in the east bedroom. In the heat of the afternoons, we were put down for a nap on our pallets. One day, when I woke, Claudia and Ethyl’s pallets were empty and I could hear laughter and voices of the grown-ups out on the lawn. I lay there looking up at the high ceiling, the cobwebs no one could reach and a wasp buzzing up there trying to find a way out and not finding one. It was cool, a breeze blowing in from the bruised screen door, and I rolled over to face the trunk. Its brown wood sides were banded with black metal, dented and pocked with time and use.
            I had to at least see if it was locked. The noise outside was the same as I crept toward it on hands and knees. There was a quilt on top and I moved it carefully. If I got into trouble, it wouldn’t be for messing up the quilt.
            There were two snap locks, which made a punk sound and the middle lock gave easily. I listened to see if the sounds had been heard, but didn’t think so and raised the lid.
            A smell of things old and forgotten hit me, of dust and decaying paper and cloth. On my knees, the trunk came up to my armpits and I sat there a few minutes looking at what was inside. It wasn’t full. There were several boxes of things, some more books and a few tins, the colors on them faded and chipped.
            I rested the lid back against the wall and took out the first box. Inside were pictures of all sizes. Very few had names or dates and I didn’t recognize anyone. The pictures were brownish and cracked and some were tintypes. The other boxes contained pictures, too, even the metal ones. I began to feel frustrated and disappointed. The trunk had always held some supreme secret, the answer to my every question, and now here were only pictures of people I didn’t know.
            In the bottom was a box covered with red cloth, now stained and torn in places. When I opened it, a dress fell out on my lap. It was stale and musty, but I could see it must have been very fine at one time. The fabric was pale blue silk with black lace over the bodice, and there were black jet beads strung on short strings. These strings covered the top of the dress and as I held it, the black beads tumbled over my hands and my eyes blurred looking at them, thinking of Grandmother Mary Martin wearing the dress, knowing it was hers.
            I didn’t hear Mother come up behind me. She sat down and gently put her arm around me.
            “Oh baby, what have you done? You mustn’t get into all these things.” I was bewildered by my findings and glad to have her there.
            “Who are all these people? And this is Grandmother’s dress, isn’t it? Why can’t I know? I want to know!” And then I was sobbing in her arms. She stroked my hair and held me until I stopped crying.
            “Your father thought you were too young to understand something we don’t understand even now,” she began slowly. “Your Grandmother Mary Martin went away when your Father was sixteen.”
            “Is she dead?” I didn’t really know what being dead meant, but it was what folks seemed to mean when they said somebody went away.
            “Yes, yes she is now,” Mother paused, wondering whether to go on. “When she first went away, she had some sort of nervous upset where she couldn’t manage her life with all the children and work at home. She went to a hospital and when she was well again, she didn’t want to come home. She said Granddad was mean to her. Your Father and his brothers and sister felt this wasn’t true. Granddad could never harm anyone. At least physically.  Mother looked out the screen door at the lawn and hedge, browning in the summer heat.
            “They never forgave her for leaving them, never understood why, and, well, her upset embarrasses them.”
            “But why would she stay away if she was well?” It didn’t make sense.
            “I don’t know. From what I hear about Granddad’s Mother, Marion, and Aunt Lizzie, they may have been part of the reason. They lived across the street and your Father said they were over here most of the time and there were quarrels. There were four children. I can’t imagine the laundry and cooking, and Granddad gave a lot of his salary from the flourmill to his Mother and Aunt Lizzie. Your Grandmother Mary had a piano that her father gave her on her marriage. She taught your Father to play. And then one day Granddad gave the piano away.“
            I tried to picture what life could have been like in this house, surely unlike our own. It sounded hard. I looked at the dress and thought about what it would be to wash such a garment. Granddad still used the old icebox in his kitchen. He kept a jar of water there to cool for drinking, and I could always see little things swimming. And why did he give away her piano?
            “That’s all I know, dear,” and she pulled me close. We went to see Grandmother Mary Martin several times at the home down in Rusk, where she went to live after she left the hospital. The home had a piano. She never wanted to see Granddad again, and died there. It is a great hurt for the family. No one talks about her anymore and you mustn’t either. Just keep what I’ve told you inside.”
            I looked down at the black jet beads and tried to imagine away a grandmother, only she wouldn’t go, she stayed there in front of me with the dress. She must have been happy when she wore it. I wondered what had gone on in her head, the agonies tearing her away from family. I wanted to help her, to talk to her, but all that was left was the dress decaying in my hands.
            “Mother, I want to remember her. May I have the dress? No one else will want it, will they?”
            “No, I suppose you may as well have it. Would you like to look at some of the pictures?”
            I put the dress carefully away in the faded red box, worried that I might break the black beads on their fragile strings, and put it in my suitcase under the bed. We sat there for a long time looking at the pictures. Mother remembered a few people. There were no pictures of Grandmother Mary Martin. Soon Dad came in and Aunt Gerta and we all sat on the bed having the grandest time laughing about the styles and looks on faces. And then they were put away in the boxes and back into the trunk and we all went out to have watermelon on the grass.
            I look at the pictures above Granddad’s bed now with a more careful eye, trying to read in Great-grandmother Marion’s expression her desires and disappointments. I know my Granddad to be a kind and gentle person, but the severity of his Mother stares down frigidly from that wall where Granddad has her enshrined. Where does my Grandmother fit in his memories? Seemingly she lost her place, and that is sad. Granddad is gone now, as are my parents. My cousins don’t know anymore than I do. The time for knowing is gone. I still take out the dress, now in my own trunk. And I think of her when I play my piano. It is important not to lose what little is left of her.
           

Revelations

The service was in a small Baptist church in Cleburne, Texas, on a suffocating hot day, humid and sticky. There was no air-conditioning in the church, just ceiling fans that moved the humidity around ineffectually. In the midst of smells of warm bodies and sadness, I learned how little I really knew about my father.
            We were here saying goodbye to my cousin, Bonnie, the first of the eight cousins on my father’s side to die, and a major loss. She had celebrated life, was a pilot and a petroleum engineer, and enjoyed four husbands. I had always wished I knew her better and thought of her as a possible source for help with my own personal calamities. But it was too late to ask for advice, Bonnie was gone of breast cancer, lying in front of us asleep on blue satin. 
            It wasn’t as if I didn’t have a mysterious warning. My sister, who is a teacher in Florida and could not come to the funeral, looked online for a local flower shop to order a spray for the coffin. Selecting Leonard’s Florist, perhaps a member of the family, she ordered her arrangement and said it was from Kay Leonard Wing. The person in the shop asked if she was family.
            “Yes, V.A. Leonard was my father.”
            “Why, V.A. was just in here this morning!” replied the florist enthusiastically.
            Silence.
            “That’s not possible. My father died 10 years ago,” my puzzled sister replied.
            The flustered florist quickly finalized the sale. A call from my sister had put me on alert that something was amiss. Perhaps V.A. was a distant relative we didn’t know, we decided, and left it there.
            I was staying with one of my cousins, my father’s sister Edith’s daughter Marilyn and her husband Bud, two of my favorite people. Bud is a stout, honorable, and kind man, and Marilyn, a sweet, devout, piano teacher. They have two lovely daughters, who my sons were always in love with, albeit the girls were 10 years older. Marilyn and I had driven down from their home in Dallas for the funeral. Two other cousins were there, daughters of my father’s brothers, Bruce and Claude. I hadn’t seen Betty Jo or Claudia in some years. It was Betty Jo’s sister Bonnie we had come to bury. The four of us were all seated in the same pew.  Claudia and her sister Ethyl, who also couldn’t attend, were Uncle Claude’s daughters, both married and moved to New York. The relatives in Texas didn’t approve of their husbands, one an Italian Catholic and the other Jewish. Betty Jo, our Uncle Bruce’s daughter was despondent at losing her sister Bonnie and we were all trying to comfort her, to no avail. Truthfully, we were all miserable in the hot, fetid church and wishing for the reception to follow in the rectory, which was air-conditioned and would have wine.
            A pretty woman of about 30 years, with long blond hair and a grey, tightfitting suit was bustling around seeing to things as though she were in charge of the organization of this sad day. I asked Betty Jo, sitting next to me, who she was. Betty Jo frowned and looked at me strangely for a long moment.
            “That’s Uncle Viv’s granddaughter, Linda,” she said, staring at me.
            I couldn’t respond. “Uncle Viv” was my father, Vivien Anderson Leonard. I looked back at her in a state of shock and she realized that I didn’t know about Linda. Marilyn and Claudia had also seen my reaction. Marilyn put her arm around me. I was incredulous. My father had a granddaughter I didn’t know? Who was her mother?
            There was no time to ask any more questions as the funeral began. I sat there, sweating, my silk blouse sticking to the wooden back of the seat, and wondering how this could be, with the cousins glancing at me when they thought I wasn’t looking. Many years earlier, my father had told me that he married at 18, but the woman’s parents quickly annulled the marriage, as she was only 16. Then, he moved to Berkeley where he started working for the police department. That’s all I knew. My mother never told me anything about this. Did she know? He married my mother 20 years later and I was born when he was 42. This was a generation difference. How could I not know about this? My cousins all seemed to know. I grew sicker with each humid moment in that pew.
            The funeral was a typical Baptist saga with organ and gospel and a loud preacher guaranteeing we were all going to heaven. I couldn’t wait for it to be over. We filed out, silently, and I drove to the cemetery with Marilyn. Poor sweet Marilyn was left to answer my questions. Apparently my father had indeed married very young to an Annie Sparks.  And there were two children, a boy Vivien Anderson Jr. and a girl Mary Jo. Linda was Mary Jo’s daughter. My father did then divorce Annie, their mother, and went to Berkeley. At least the last part of the story he had told me.
            But children, I didn’t know anything about any children! As it slowly sunk in, my half-sibs became real. Apparently, they spent time at my Grandfather Andy’s house in Cleburne and that’s how my cousins knew about them. My father moved to Berkeley, as he said he did, and only returned the 20 years later, living in Dallas, where he met and married my mother, 12 years his junior.
            Thoughts going through my head were of his feelings for these children. Did he take care of them? He apparently did, as far as he was able, but it ended at high school for them. There was no help with college, which my sister and I had. In fact we were raised with the idea that we would always go to college. There was grade school, high school and then there was college. No question. Later my father helped when I was a single parent in graduate school. But no mention of how he failed to help his other children and grandchildren with any similar aspirations for higher education.
            And I learned that my mother knew. Linda visited my parents in Washington where my father had gone to start a new department of Police Science and Administration and to write all those textbooks. He would not let his son, V.A., the daughter, Mary Jo, or Linda contact me.  Mother never shared her feelings about this other family with me even though she lived six years after my father died and most of those in the same apartment building where I saw her every day. How can she not have told me about this? I could not fathom this breach of confidence.
            My parents were very private people. Their close relationship so many times excluded my sister and me. I never knew how much money my father made, what his hopes were, his disappointments. Maybe it happened so long ago at a time when such a happening would have shamed him. Was it a protective act? Of who? Him? Me?
            That command for no contact with my sister and me was long-lived. Linda did not acknowledge me at the funeral, though she continued to organize everyone at the cemetery and at the reception following where I had the opportunity to talk with all of my cousins. Linda’s mother was dead, but her Uncle Viv was still living, although he was ill and did not come to the funeral. Somehow I got through the reception, where I learned from Betty Jo that another Leonard family member was promiscuous. My Uncle Bruce, a physician, also had a second family, the difference being that Bonnie and Betty Jo knew about the two boys he had fathered with his office nurse.
            On the drive back to Dallas, Marilyn called Bud and told him to open a bottle of wine; it was going to be a long night.
 

Room Again

It’s morning. I know because the shift has changed at the nursing station. There are fresher, cleaner aids taking blood pressures and temperatures. They pass by this room.  There is not much time left here and it is important to first monitor the hopeful.
            The older black man with a stoop to his shoulders was here with his mop, dressed in white, wiping at a floor that isn’t dirty and replacing the water pitcher used only by visitors. It is a large room, private enough for dying, though that is something being done inside the smaller space of the man in the bed. There are chairs enough for the watchers. Someone is here all the time, waiting.
Outside the window is the new bank building, where in earlier weeks John would look while talking about the new store he was going to build, the space it would have. Then he withdrew into his coma and grows smaller as he gets ready to leave us.
            My mother-in-law, Leda, sits dozing. She has a brown sweater on against the chill of what we know is coming and her glasses lie loosely in her full lap. Leda is a lovely, patient person, one of those women who always seem to be expecting something good to happen. Even if it doesn’t, the hope that it might still come keeps her going. Her hands have cared for seven children, one retarded. They are strong and warm but cannot help her husband, who lies death still between clean, creased sheets.
            His wasted body floats weightless on the lambs wool pad. Inside his head a spider tumor spins webs about his life, clouding memory and slowing the systems that run his body. The John we knew is not here in this room anymore. What is here is the covering, the tent, and I wish he would leave it. The tucked covers mark a limit he would not understand. Once he was so alive and vital, stretching and growing. He could hardly have imagined the narrow closet that now defines his illness.
            Leda nods and opens her eyes to reach out for John’s thin arm. She doesn’t cry. Tears will come later with realization of the loss. I want to leave her alone with him so I go out into the hall. The nurses ask about him and he is the same. At the end of the hall is a large window with a brown leather couch where I like to sit. The view is of the city and if I look hard I can see the store, his store. This is where I like to think about him, not in the room. The day is cold and I think what it is to feel cold. That was something I remember, how he had buzzing in his head after the surgery and then could not feel hot and cold. And I wonder what senses he feels now, whether he knows we are there.
            Soon John’s mother will arrive, a classic Russian babushka we call Baba, brought by her other sons and daughters, John’s siblings. Leda and I will leave the room when they come. Baba will be sobbing and inconsolable and Leda doesn’t need to watch that. And there is more. Baba is the matriarch of this family and wanted Leda and all of John’s children to give him back to her when he fell ill. “You can always get another husband but you can never replace a son,” she  said, wanting to feed John herbs and rice to rid his body of the poison in the tumor. She forbid doctors and surgery. 
We did it anyway; if there was a cure, it was not rice. Our hope lay instead in the intelligent use of modern medicine.  The accusations stand. Baba thinks that we killed John. There is no way that chasm can be closed, no resolution to the differences in culture and generation. And now that he is comotose, whether the rice would have been a better treatment or anyway the same, cannot be judged.
            And then Leda is calling me to come back in, to phone the others, my husband, his brothers, sister, and Baba. I make the calls but John will not wait. He is going at last, his breath a labor and he is in a hurry.  Leda has moved her chair near the bed and holds his hand as though it were possible to go with him. I hold his other, trying to pull him back from where I can’t follow. But he knows something we don’t and as his breathing becomes shallow and fades, I can physically feel his release and know the exact moment when he leaves.  The loss was palpable, so real I could touch it.
The family arrives. They all want to hold his body, grieving in solitary and personal ways. But only Leda and I know that John is no longer in it. He has found a larger room and moved with no forwarding address.