Silence
I still feel the hush that came over the room when I switched off the oxygen compressor. He hadn't been breathing oxygenated air in days: the hospice nurse had explained in her gentle but harrowing way that it was unnecessary, a consideration more for the comfort of the family than that of the patient. But I had become used to the constant, steady, pulmonary sound of the strange machine plugged into an outlet in the far corner of our bedroom. It was the somehow-familiar, otherworldly breath of an astronaut walking impossibly through the crushing vacuum of space, or a diver in scuba gear deep in the black pressurized waters of the unknown. Even with its long network of thin plastic tubing dangling pointlessly from the wastebasket under the nightstand on his side of the bed, it soothed me, implausibly, in the most ancient and animal part of my brain, as we went about the horrifying, dizzying, sublime business of his death together.
Every week-long goodbye whispered to him, every sob escaped from the visitor's chair beside him, every crisis of faith realized in a howl of fear from the doorway, had as an underpinning soundtrack this steadfast, unchanging, unflinching rhythm of robot breath.
When he died. (Write it.)
When he died, I shut it off. Absurdly. There, with his no-longer-breathing body, in the newly absolute barrenness of our bed, I let the silence blossom around us. There was no more vibration in him. No more sound. Nothing to keep him warm. To keep his lip curling subtly every rare and precious time I managed to say the right thing to him. To keep his hand squeezing mine, whether in assent or seizure I'll never fully know. Even at rest, in the silences between lovers both comfortable and damning, even while actively dying...in life the body is never without its sound. Here was his--my lover's body which I loved so much--cold and utterly quiet in my arms. Even the tumors had gone silent; and at last, finally, had stopped their hateful growing.
One year ago today, I walked all the way to the very threshold of mystery with the love of my life--this man, this perplexity, who bristled with petty jealousies yet trusted me to be the love of his death. And one year ago today, he crossed that barrier while I sat in the silence that remained and learned its cacophonous lessons.
Today, I hear every pitch. Every harmony. Every pulse, every resonance, every wave. I listen with religious fervor to each perceptible trace of living sound. Today, I hold my lover's memory like a symphony in my soul. Let the world think me mad, for dancing in the silence.