—

ONE MORNING, ON my way to see Win, I take a few moments with Felix. I’ve noticed a decline, and I am sure he has, too. Win is sleeping more, engaging less. She only eats a meal a day. She has stopped putting on makeup.

“How long do you think she has?” he asks me.

“If I knew that, Felix, I’d be a millionaire.”

He smiles and hands me a cup of coffee. I have become part of the household. I have my own assigned mug and Felix buys me a vanilla creamer that I like. I keep a toothbrush and a pair of sweats in a reusable grocery bag in the mudroom, in case it’s a late night. When we sit at the table together for dinner, I have a usual spot.

I slip into it now, and wait for Felix to sit across from me. “How are you doing?” I ask.

He sips his coffee and raises a brow. “I mean,” he says.

“Are you sleeping all right?”

“No,” he admits. “Every time I hear a sound—even if it’s a bug hitting the window—I jump out of bed to make sure she’s okay.”

We have moved Win to the guest room, to a hospital bed provided by hospice. There’s a wheelchair nestled up against the side of the refrigerator now, too. Caregivers are so busy trying to stay afloat, to remember medications and dosages and to be brave and compassionate and hide their own fear, that they don’t even see the water level rising.

“She’s not okay,” I say. “She’s dying.”

“I know that,” Felix snaps, and then his eyes widen. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry. It sucks. You are allowed to be angry, sad, frustrated, whatever.”

He rubs his hands over his face, making his hair stand on end. “The whole time we’ve been married,” he says, “we never said goodbye to each other. I know that’s weird, right? But when I left for work, or if she went out with friends, we just waved and went off, because we knew we were going to see each other in a few hours. It’s kind of our little superstition.” Felix looks up at the ceiling, as if he can see Win. “Now I have to say it. I have to say goodbye.”

I reach across the table and hold his hand. “I know.”

A sob folds him at the waist. “I love her. I love her to death.”

“You love her through death,” I correct gently. “You don’t stop loving someone just because they’re not physically with you.”

One of my favorite concepts from Ancient Egypt was kheperu, or manifestations. An individual was much more than just the khat, or body. You were made up of the ib—a heart; a ka soul—a familial legacy; a ba soul—your personality and reputation; shuyet—a shadow; and ren—your name. After death, while the ka stayed earthbound in the mummified corpse, the ba soul winged its way to Re, the sun god. There is an 18th Dynasty tomb in Luxor that shows a procession carrying all these different pieces of the deceased. The physical act of death affected only one of those, and the afterlife was where all the parts came back together.

“She’ll be here,” I tell Felix. “In the way your living room is decorated. Or the bulbs that come up next spring. The way you remember how it rained every day of your honeymoon.”

“She told you that?” Felix murmurs, blushing.

“She said you found other ways to pass the time.” I smile at him. “If you wind up remarrying, she’ll be there, too. Because she’s the one who taught you how to love someone.”

“I’m not going to fall for another woman.”

“Okay,” I say, privately thinking otherwise. The good ones often do, because they remember how it feels to be happy. It’s not a replacement; it’s more like an echo.

Then I hear Win’s voice behind me. “You can get remarried, Felix,” she says. “Just wait till I’m gone.”

There is a smile threaded through her words, and she looks better than she has all week. She has a bright scarf wrapped around her head and is wearing a sundress. Her eyes are dancing, illuminated. With the exception of bruises in her arms from where blood has been drawn, she doesn’t even look sick.

Felix stands and wraps an arm around her. He kisses her temple. “Don’t joke about that.”

“So,” she says, “I’d love to get some fresh air.”

Felix rises from the table, ready to do her bidding.

“Oh, baby,” she says, touching his arm. “You were up all night with me. I thought you could get some rest while Dawn and I take a walk.”

She looks good, but she doesn’t look that good. I hesitate, but Win interrupts. “I meant you could walk, and I could be pushed.” Then she crosses to the refrigerator and lowers herself into the portable wheelchair. “It’s beautiful out.”

Honestly, it isn’t. It’s so humid that my skin feels rubbery; it’s stagnant and hot, and the sky is threatening rain. But Win hasn’t wanted to leave the house for some time. If she feels like getting some fresh air today, we’re going, even if a freak blizzard hits.

I grab my purse and an umbrella. Then I push Win outside and ease her chair backward off the porch. “Where to?” I ask.

She points. “That way,” she says, tilting her chin toward the sun.

I push her several blocks, until we are sitting outside a small dog park. There is an insane Chihuahua barking orders at a mastiff, and a mutt humping its owner’s leg. “He should get a dog,” Win announces.

“Felix? Does he like dogs?”

“I don’t know. I’m allergic, so it never came up.” She nods more definitively. “Yeah. A dog.”

“I’ll make a suggestion,” I tell her.

“What about a wife?” Win asks.

“Instead of a dog? Or in addition to?”

She smirks. “Do you think he’ll get married again?”

“How would that make you feel?”

Win considers this for a moment. “Fair,” she says softly.

I wonder what she means by that. Does she feel like he deserves a partner, because she is leaving him? Does she feel that, if Felix were the one dying, it is what she’d want for herself?

“I want to be remembered,” Win announces.

“Felix and I were kind of talking about that today,” I tell her. “I don’t think that’s going to be a problem for him.”

“I wasn’t talking about Felix,” she says.

“Is there a charity you support?” I ask. “Maybe there’s a way to have an art scholarship in your name—”

“No art,” Win interrupts flatly, cutting me off.

I let the heat fan off the sidewalk, rippling toward me. “We could do a legacy project,” I suggest. “Something you can leave behind that’s a reflection of who you are.”

“No art,” Win says again.

“Okay, okay!” I hold up my hands in surrender. “It doesn’t have to be art. I’ve stuffed Build-A-Bears with the T-shirts of a client so her grandkids would have them. I’ve made recipe books and written down oral histories. One woman was a master quilter with rheumatoid arthritis who couldn’t finish a project, so she dictated instructions for her daughter to finish. I even had a client with dementia who was a master gardener, but he started forgetting the names of plants, so we made a picture book and he’d flip through and try to remember. He got frustrated sometimes, but man, the joy on his face when he got it right—” I break off, realizing that Win is somewhere deep inside herself.

“There was an artist in Seattle, Briar Bates, who was dying of cancer,” I say carefully. “She wanted her art to outlive her. So she choreographed a water ballet for her friends to perform as a flash mob after she was gone. She sewed the costumes and organized the synchronized swimming and they all came together to do it in a fountain after she died. She wanted her friends to grieve together and for it not to be sad, but joyful.”

“So…a way to leave a shadow in the world, even when you’re not in it.”

I nod. “That’s a beautiful way to say it.”

We watch a puppy race to the fence, turning on a dime to grab a tennis ball. “Felix would be terrible at water ballet,” Win says after a moment.

“But he’d do it for you.”

“I know,” she says, on a sob. “That’s what’s even worse.”

She lifts the hem of her dress and wipes at her eyes. I stand, rummaging for a tissue.

“You asked me why I don’t paint.”

I give her the tissue and then sit down with my back against the chain-link fence so that I am facing away from the dog park, but looking at her.

“When you’re an artist,” Win says, “it’s because there’s something inside you that you can’t keep from spilling out. Maybe it comes in the form of sentences, or a grand jeté, or a stroke of a paintbrush. The end result can be a million different things. But the seed, it’s always the same. It’s the emotion there isn’t a word for. The feeling that’s too big for your body. To show someone your soul, you have to bleed. People who are comfortable—people who are content—they don’t create art.”

“You stopped painting because you stopped hurting.”

She nods.

I reach for her hand, hold it between mine. “But you’re hurting now, Win.”

“I know. But not because there’s too much inside me.” She sucks in a breath. “Because there’s nothing left.”

I shake my head. “I don’t buy that. I know you. I see you.”