I was holding Rosalie close, cradling her head in my arms when she died. On the twenty-third of April, we would have celebrated fifty-three years of marriage. I’m coping—sort of.
A week before she died, we were sitting next to each other on our recliners. We weren’t paying attention to the endless commercials that incessantly interrupted David Letterman, who was struggling to interest us. Both of us were occupied, thinking of other issues of more import.
“Well,” she said, pulling out the nasal tube that was flowing oxygen into her nostrils “pretty soon you’ll be able to get a dog.”
Bear, our previous German shepherd, had died six years previously, and we didn’t get another dog. Those six years constituted the only time in my life that I can remember, being dog less. Rosalie had developed balance problems—the aftermath of a viral encephalopathy and a brain biopsy. We were worried that she would trip or fall over a dog. She knew I missed having a dog and her out-of-the-blue statement was typical of her dark sense of humor.
“Stop talking nonsense,” I responded, gruffly.
Throughout our last six months together, I prayed that the end would be fast and with as little pain and discomfort as possible. The diagnosis of her stage-four lung cancer came on January 4, 2012, after we noticed that she had trouble breathing after only mild exercise. This was troubling because she routinely logged eleven to fourteen miles in fifty or sixty minutes on our stationary bike, burning more than three hundred calories, four or five times a week.
Travels with Charlize: in Search of Living Alone