The room was a basic hotel room, but the lamp on the bureau was a huge blue lamp; I do not think I have ever seen such a big lamp. The room was dark because it did not face the lowering sun, and so I switched the lamp on. But the lamp did not work. I checked to see if it was plugged in and it was, but it did not work. From the window was a view of Main Street. The man was still sitting on the bench, but he had put his flip phone away. I did not see any other people. I sat down on the bed and gazed into space.
* * *
When Catherine was dying, I had spent the summer with her in Newton, Massachusetts, with the girls, they were eight and nine; I found a day camp for them there—and William came up on weekends. The girls made friends very easily, especially Chrissy, and because she and Becka were always, as I have said, close—though they fought a great deal at times—Chrissy’s friends became Becka’s friends as well.
My point is: I had my days free to be with Catherine—Catherine Cole, as William said whenever he called: “How is Catherine Cole doing?”—and Catherine and I, this is what I felt, made a nice pair. I was oddly （I thought） not afraid of death, and when her friends stopped coming to see her, as her hair fell out and she became so thin, it was mostly just the two of us, and Catherine hired a housekeeper to help with the girls at night. In my memory—except for when we first found out about her illness, she had shown up in New York to tell us, and she had been shaking, and to see her shaking like that had been tremendously distressing, except for that time, she did not seem to me to be unduly afraid, and much of the time—almost all of the time—in a way, we just chatted. I am not sure, thinking of this now, that I really believed she would die. She may not have really believed it either. She had treatments once a week, and we got it figured out: I knew we had one hour after the treatment before she would become ill, and so after the treatment we went to a diner and had muffins, and I remember Catherine eating the muffin, and drinking her coffee, but the memory I have of her is one where she was kind of stuffing the muffin into her mouth almost furtively—although I am not sure that is the right word—and then I would drive her back to the house in time for her to lie down and feel queasy; she never threw up, she just felt very bad that first day.
When William showed up on Friday nights, Catherine would often be asleep, and he would stand looking at her, and then leave the bedroom, and he did not talk much to me or, I think, to the girls during this time. In my memory this is the way it was.
* * *
—
And his not talking to me on the ride to Presque Isle made me think of this.
* * *
—
But Catherine and I had a rhythm going, and with the girls gone all day we would talk. As she became sicker she was in her bed more, and there was a big chair near the bed where I sat. It was not hard for me to do this, I would not want to give that impression, I loved the woman, and with my girls with us at night it felt exactly the right place to be. “Don’t let them be afraid,” Catherine said to me toward the end, as equipment was brought into her room. “Let them play with it,” and in a way the girls did because （I think） they did not see their grandmother afraid, or me, and so they adjusted to the oxygen things that were brought in, and to the nurses that arrived toward the end.
* * *
—
Catherine’s doctor spoke to me on the phone every day; he called with a regularity that I loved him for. He said: “This is not going to be pretty.” And I said, “Okay.”
I did not know how not pretty it would be, but that part did not last long. I told the girls that Grandma was too sick at the moment for them to see her, and they seemed to adjust to this. Their father came to them at that point—I mean William moved in full-time for those last two weeks—and I think he helped keep them calm. But toward the end it became horrifying.
One day William took the girls—it was a weekend—to a museum in Boston, and I saw Catherine becoming more and more agitated and it was heartrending. She was no longer someone I could talk to, she was a woman in discomfort, and although they gave her morphine—which she had rejected until the very end—she was still very distressed and unsettled that day. And I went in to see her, and she was plucking at the bedclothes and she was speaking in a raspy voice, about what I （sadly） do not remember except that it did not make a lot of sense, and I was just tremendously aware of her growing discomfort.
And so I made a mistake: I watched her and then I put my hand on her arm, and I said, “Oh Catherine, it will be soon now, I promise.”