Lying supine—my leg in plaster and a contraption much like a circus performer’s trapeze hanging above my thin bed—nausea suddenly overwhelmed me like a rocking boat lurching me forward. My eyes flew open and I reached up to grab the triangular handle bar and pull myself to sitting. I wasn’t given warning; my body was slow with warning bells for anything at all, and I vomited all over the clean bedsheets and warm brown blanket the day nurse had tucked in around me. I groaned with not only misery but also with embarrassment.
Jack was at my side, so quickly that maybe he’d been standing there all along. “Joy, I’m here.” Then Warnie too.
“I’m sorry.” I fell back on the pillows in shame.
Warnie, lit with the evening sun filtering into the room, held a silver kidney basin—the ubiquitous throw-up basin we’d brought home from the hospital. How I’d hoped that leaving the hospital after five months would mean leaving these accoutrements behind. No such luck.
Jack hastily yanked the blanket from its moorings and then grabbed the bowl from Warnie to lickety-split spill the liquid into it. Warnie placed a wet washcloth on my forehead as I moaned, humiliated and emptied. This was not how I wanted to be seen or remembered.
Jack placed the basin and the blanket on the floor as the nurse bustled in to research the commotion. Jack’s precious face obliterated my view of all else in the room as he bowed over me. In an instant his lips were on mine with a kiss full and kind and overwhelmingly imbued with compassion. He heeded no mind to the sickness that remained on me, to the propriety of asepsis; he only loved me.
I’d felt certain of his eros in the months before this unsterile kiss, but perhaps some small and niggling part of me had believed it pity or forbearance, that his medieval virtues compelled him to love me in my dying. But non! It was this wink of time when I whorled toward understanding, into and resting in the arms of the love we shared—an uncommon and vulnerable combination of the four loves we’d traveled with and toward: agape, storge, philia, and now, unquestionably, eros. Our journey—riddled with both pain and joy—culminated in a kiss I would never have anticipated as the revelation it became, as the comfort and mastery of love.
Jack rested his head on my pillow, and when I thought he might stroke my head or cheek, instead he began to pray, an earnest prayer that God would give him my suffering, allow him to bear my burdens. Then he rested for a while facing me with his eyes closed and his lips ever so gently on mine.
He’d aged during these last months: I could see this. His hair was thinner, as was his face, but to me he was even more beautiful. His full and beautiful mouth. His deep eyes.
“You want to take my suffering but you can’t, Jack. It’s mine to carry. You’re the one who told me there is no bargaining with God.”
“No.” He lifted his head from my pillow. “Your pain is not yours alone anymore. It’s ours. I want to carry it for you. I’m asking God.”
“This is mine, but with you I can bear it. It’s you who’s guided me here—to faith: I know I’m beloved.”
“You are beloved by more than God, Joy. By me. By Warnie. By your sons and all the friends who have embraced you; I’ve never seen anyone make friends as easily and quickly as you.” His voice cracked, and he rested his head on my pillow. “I love you with all my being.”
“I love you too,” I said in a faded voice. “But just because we love God and are committed to him doesn’t mean we are exempt from the pain and loss in this world. We can’t ask to be the exceptions.”
We rested there for quite a while, the sounds of spring outside: wind, birdsong, and Paxford’s voice calling out. The creak of the floors told us Warnie was upstairs. The kitchen pots and pans clanged together as Mrs. Miller made lunch. I fell asleep quickly and deeply, as I often did now, a sudden sleep completely different from the slow falling of an unmedicated rest.
I awoke when Jack’s head lifted from my pillow.
“Poetry,” I said. “Let’s read.”
He scooted back his chair and fetched Wordsworth from the side table. “Before we read, I have something to tell you.”
“Is it bad news? Because I’m not sure I can take anymore.”
“It’s Bill.”
I girded my heart with what armor remained and clenched my hands into fists at my sides. My foot, raised in traction, began to throb again—the birth pangs of a greater pain. I reached for the bottle of pain pills and swallowed one. “Tell me.”