Chapter 4 — A Yellow Sweater and a Pull Tab
I knew how strange the request was.
I turned it over for two days.
And then a hospital chaplain married us, in Julian’s room, with a nurse and an orderly as witnesses.
I wore a yellow sweater.
It was not a wedding, not really, and I had nothing bridal to wear, so I wore the sweater I had come in that morning, and it did not matter, because the ceremony was not about appearances.
We had no wedding ring, either.
And so, when the moment came, Julian took a small soda-can pull tab, which he had saved for the purpose from a drink on his tray, and he slipped it gently onto my finger, and it was, absurdly and perfectly, the most meaningful ring I have ever worn.
For the next seven days, I never left his side.
I took a leave from everything else in my life, and I stayed, and I held his hand through every difficult breath, through the long nights and the harder days, as his failing heart slowed and struggled and at last, quietly, stopped.
And then he was gone, and I sat alone in his empty hospital room, holding the hand that had gone still, and I was stunned, genuinely stunned, by how much silence a person I had known for such a short time could leave behind.
Seven days.
I had been married for seven days, to a man I had known for less than a year, and his death opened a hole in me that felt entirely out of proportion to the time we had shared.
I did not understand, sitting in that silence, why it hurt so much.
I would understand soon.
Because a few minutes later, an elderly man walked into the room, carrying a heavy green backpack, and everything I thought I knew about my brief, strange marriage was about to come apart.
I have wondered, since, whether the hole Julian left in me was really out of proportion to our seven days, or whether I simply did not yet know how much those seven days had contained.
Because grief, I have learned, does not measure itself in the length of an acquaintance.
It measures itself in love, and in that final week, holding the hand of a dying man through his hardest hours, I had given him more of my whole attention, more of my undivided tenderness, than I had given anyone in a year.
Seven days is not long.
But seven days spent entirely, wholly, at the bedside of a person you are helping to die is a kind of intimacy that most relationships never reach in decades.
I had known Julian for a week.
But I had known him completely, and he me, and the silence he left behind was the size of that completeness, not the size of the calendar.
