A piece of my past, chapter #3 of 4

When our front door opened, you looked down a hall into our bathroom. She was there, lying on the floor by the toilet.. It looked as if she had been sitting on it when she had a seizure. She had slumped forward, still not wearing anything, and landed headfirst on the tile, her knees still drawn up so that it looked almost like she had knelt down then placed her face on the floor rather than fall to it.

Time stretches out at this point, a ten foot hallway becomes a half-mile, then a thousand. I reach her, I think I had been calling her name. I don’t even have to turn her over or take a pulse. I put my hand on her back, and she’s terribly, horribly cold.

I can still feel it now, years later. I cannot bear to turn her over, perhaps this is a mercy at this point. The scene has haunted me to this very day, and seeing her dead eyes may have pushed me past any point of ever returning.

The air seems filled with a molasses fog, and I am struggling to breathe in it. I move in a drug-like daze to the phone, pick it up, and dial nine one one. I cannot recall what I told the person who answered, but I was still remarkably calm. Calm because this had to be some sort of nightmare, and nightmares always end with waking up and putting one’s arm around the warm, soft form of one’s sleeping spouse. The nightmare is the cold, unmoving form in the bathroom, the one that I cannot believe in.

I remember going to the window to watch for the aid units, and laying my face against the window. With a nasty start, I realized it was cold too. In fact, all warmth seemed to have been drained from the world.

I moved to the couch, and slumped down in my state of stunned disbelief. Next was a knock at the door, and a voice calling out. I answered weakly, and a cop walked into my living room, while his partner confronted my nightmare in the bathroom. I remember some basic questions, and the arrival of more people, including an ambulance with medics. I remember very little of this, except I know I gave them my mom and step-dad’s phone number. The cop called, and merely said “something bad has happened, you need to get over here right away.”

They lived very close, but time had lost all meaning to me at that point, all I know is that my mom’s tear streaked face loomed into view sometime after the call. Strangely, I had not shed much in the way of tears yet. This was, after all, a nightmare and oh please it should soon be over.

Finally, the cops and a medic sat down with me at the dining room table. They explained what would happen next, but they were speaking some strange dialect to me. Then one of the cops brought it all home. He held out his hand, and placed into mine two rings. One was Gretchen’s wedding ring, and the other a decorative ring she wore on the other hand. This was a touch of realism I didn’t usually find in my nightmares, and this is what finally cut through the haze and hammered home to me that this was real.

Putting those small personal effects of the woman I loved in my hand was like a hard slap. Gretchen was dead. It was then that the furious thunderstorm of grief began.