The gate was tall and held closed by ivy. Does ivy stall all year round, or does it come in waves, green working its way in bloom up the spine?
My husband’s back never fell over, or fell in. He bent down to do his stretches, touch his toes, but never was it natural for his posture to sway from straight, upwards. His chest puffed out, but strongly, and so did his gut, in beer and meat, though not anymore. It was an odd balance, but he had known how to carry it, those years I had known him.
His walk, as anyone’s, was characteristic. We were the same height. I was thinner, when he was heavier. Then he was thinner, when he got sick, and bald, too. I’d wake in the night and see the pale dome of his head. He had once hid it under pillows. Then he stopped. There was no shame.
It was our first meeting with Dr. Appausi, and we stood outside the ivy-strung gate. It was tall, very tall. It was black iron. It seemed impossible to open. My husband shook the gate for a moment, with weak arms, before drawing back again. I was unsure if he was waiting for me to give it a try. Or since he could not open it, he assumed neither of us would try again. But I held the gate and gave it a nudge. It made a brassy cry, then settled back into a quick silence, still pinched shut.
I can’t for the life of me remember if ivy holds in fall. Perhaps the vines do, hardening and going dusty, while the leaves themselves shed as all others do.
“Well,” he said. “Were there no directions for getting in?”
I thought about it; I didn’t think there had been. I made double sure of the address, and where we stood even fit the description of the old, gray stone building, where the stones were large, not like stacked bricks, but like units of blocks, where windows fit in snugly with iron latticed panes. The windows were muggy, and gave the sense that flies were tucked in the corners, and in the running where the panes slid open and closed.
“We should go around,” I said. “This looks like an old entrance.”
“Fine,” he said, “we’ll go around.”
He began walking to the right, and so I followed; but where he went, the sidewalk kept running down, and there was no other way the gate would appear to allow us through. The next building was, too, in the realm of where the gate ran. It seemed like it could be a house. I imagined, for a moment, living beside the old stone building, where the doctor would be. It wasn’t an office, per se, but something more startling. The building itself seemed a gateway, behind the iron gate, taking us in, letting us have the conversations, letting us observe the death, stand before an oval mirror with a spindly frame, leaning against a wall, letting us observe the death, again, and ask it questions, be prescribed. What was I expecting of the doctor? He wasn’t the real doctor — the stethoscope to the chest, asking my husband to breathe deeply. Yes, breathe deeply. Well that is just the problem isn’t it? The real doctor was of no help anymore, he had even said so, so directly and unapologetic, “there is nothing more to do.”
We reached another entrance. We had walked leftwards for too long, without promise. I proposed we turn back, towards the gate, and walk further right. And we did. My husband followed behind me this time. I was starting to fear our being late. “Let’s hurry,” I said to him, turning my head, as I walked. I turned my head for such a small second, that all I saw was his wandering head against a foggy city sky.
It was an end of summer day. Charlotte and Eden were at home, where my mother was staying, watching them these long days when my husband and I were gone at appointments, scouting for promises and feeding payments into thin, long tubes. Charlotte and Eden loved my mother. I imagined my young self, sitting at home with a nanny, which I never had — imagined that my mother and father were out all day, imagined they were out to dinner, imagined love.
When we reached the gate again, it was still closed. A piece of me expected that once we came back to it, the ivy would have died, gone brittle as bird bone, and we would swing the old gate in, and walk inside.
It was an end of summer day, and I have never liked to be late. “We need to figure this out,” I said, just as I realized, with the quickening of my step, that there was a corner to round, past the right side of the gate! And on the side which that corner turned onto, there was an ending to the gate, where it made a final stake in the ground, and we could near the stone building, where of course, there was to be another door.
My husband followed me to the door of the building. We would be just on time for our appointment. Dr. Appausi, when I had talked to him over the phone, had said a knock would suffice, and he would be right down.
I knocked, and looked at my husband, beside me. We were the same height, still. He never shrunk, in height, only in his weight. He was very thin. His whole face showed it, shallowing. Even graying. Yes, there was gray to show itself, but in the face, where it never really ought to be, except for stubble, or a long grown beard, which he never had. Old, you are supposed to let the gray beard grow, the hairs on the head, gone silver. Old, you watch the gray and count it and wonder how a follicle works, how small it is.
“I’m glad we made it on time,” I said to my husband.
“I’m glad it worked out for you,” he said back, not in a very glad way. He didn’t say many glad things to me. He felt weak doing so. I could tell.
“And for you.”
Yes, I had made the appointment, had the idea of it, but for all of us. For Charlotte and Eden — for him. For myself, I suppose, but not entirely. There was nothing to do about me. It would be what it was. But I was the mother. I made the beds; I settled soft pillows and I would settle them softer, when it all happened, and he was gone. I had my ways of placing blankets on beds. And differently, when I placed them on couches, or across the arm of a leather chair. I was ready to be prepared, and so I found Dr. Appausi, and his practice.
It was counseling. Not for problems — yes, of course, for problems — but not between my husband and I. It was not a counseling for what had happened, but for what would happen, and how it could happen in a softer way. Softness always mumbled to me from the wrinkles in rooms, from the air, and the space between the paint and the wall.
We headed down the hall to the doctor’s office. It was like that last January when my husband was in bed all day, and I called him lazy. I came into our room and asked why he wasn’t up yet, at midday. He mumbled horrible things. Things of his hurt and things that hurt me. I could never place them. That is vague. But any of it, the harshness, it was the moment jelly rumbles and then resettles and it was always still. It is stillness. And he would not get out of bed. We went to the hospital two days later, where the hallways were long and we moved from room to room. Doctors have long hallways before them.
My husband and I sat on a small sofa together, across from Dr. Appausi, who held no papers, and no pen. He had glasses. My husband did too, but he hadn’t worn them the entirety of the year.
“My children’s father could be dead in two months,” I said.
“So could your husband,” my husband cut in.
“I don’t know how they’re supposed to understand that, or if they even can,” I said. “Yes — and my husband.”
“This is hard. Incredibly hard.” Dr. Appausi was a bald man, too. There were two bald men in the room, and then myself. I had long brown hair, then. No grays, nothing to cover or fear. It is strange how baldness comes with the illness, that there are no grays to finger or tuck under other, plainer strands; there is no counting of the gray, and therefore age; it is hidden from you, as though small grays are growing inwards, backwards, down into the scalp, into the brain — yes there is ageing, dying, but you cannot, with the grays, prove it, as old people are allowed to.
“It is hard,” my husband said.
“What do we do?” I asked Dr. Appausi.
“Do is one question. Say is another. Want is even another. It’s all about the questions, isn’t it. Hasn’t it been, for you?”
My husband and I looked at each other. I didn’t feel what I thought I would, when it all began, the question stirring, running between us, pulling us together, as the hook of a question does; yet, where my question mark hooked, it fell to him, into a hole. And where his questions, I assumed, hooked, I became the hole, the final mark, the end.
I somehow felt that his question was only about living or dying, and my questions were multiple, of life, after his death, and life, while our children lived and my mother still lived, and all went on living with questions beyond that.
I’ll admit that it wasn’t really about him going softly; no, it was never that. It was for my children to cry well and good, and understand. Tell me ways for them to remember my husband, a man who could say things glad, gladly — who wished his hair would grow out for them to braid.
I knew he’d never let them settle braids in his hair, not with ties. He’d say “you can braid it, but don’t put the ties in — no ribbons.” I put ribbons in the children’s hair. On Sundays, and then Mondays, when it was the first day of the school week.
One night, I walked into their rooms, only to find one room empty, and the other occupied by the both of them, one girl trying ribbons in the other’s hair. Then it would be the other head’s turn, the other hand’s turn. They learned how to settle down those ribbons without my explicit teaching. They went to the other’s room. They were playing on the rug, atop the wood floor, atop the first floor of the house, atop the ground, atop — how large is the core of the world, I wondered, and is that core different from the core of the Earth. Their hairs sit pale on it all, now; not a silver pale, but light and when the lightness catches in the light, from the sun or the sconces, it flashes gray for a second, or nothing, gray or nothing.
Charlotte, my oldest, heard me crevice the door, and peered up to me, from the floor. Then little Eden stared at me, too. They each had different colored eyes. My husband never died. His hair opens gray from his head. I still pretend it is bald. It hurts me less. The illness fell from him, like the silk of a ribbon unfurling. He was cured.
We had gone to Dr. Appausi several times, with the same questions. The same what to dos and what to says. How do you prepare your children for their father to die? Which do you explain first, a father or a death? It was all reasonable of me — to ask these things. I wouldn’t know what to do. I wouldn’t have known what to do. What does a woman do when she is free? What does she do with that guilt of her freedom? The children playing well in one room, braiding hair that ended in ribbons. My two daughters, my two daughters.
We’d move to a smaller house. We’d take turns choosing the colors of the rooms’ walls. My first pick would be for the kitchen to be yellow. We’d bake pies, the three of us girls. I’d tell them stories of their father. I’d make up stories of gladness in my yellow kitchen. The girls would share a room and paint it white. Then they’d paint it a daisy field and robin nest with little eggs, and I would not be mad. I’d be glad for them. The grave would be stone and gray and grave, and be the graveness of their father. The exterior we’d paint, too, all by ourselves, a deep blue.
Image by Tanya Barrow on unsplash.com, licensed under CC 2.0.
- Years Before the Divorce, When My Children Were Young - February 25, 2026