Matthew Trumbull
They are waiting to take you away, but I want you to know that this is not what anyone planned; there are so many meaningless clothes we could have dressed you in, if we had known that today, you would have your worst coughing attack in the three years you’ve died this long death; that today, for ten of the longest minutes I have ever lived, I would helplessly watch you cough and spit diseased fluid into a red Solo cup; that today, I would helplessly kneel at the end of your hospice bed and massage your bare feet; that today, a few hours after your scarred lungs had finally settled, you would die; that today, two students from the medical school to which you are donating your body would arrive to collect you, but not before telling us that in one year, your ashes would be returned but the sweater you were wearing, the one that Mom bought you in Paris, would not; that today, Mom would be willing to part with your dead body but not that sweater, which is alive with your scent and her memories of you; now she digs through your dresser for a different shirt while I take off your wedding ring so gently, it feels like a question: is this all right?; your college ring: is this all right?; your watch: is this all right?; am I robbing your grave if you aren’t yet in one?; my mother choses an old, faded t-shirt and my cousin’s husband is enlisted to help me change you, because he is the strongest of our gathered family; we wedge our arms under your back and lift your frail torso upright; I feel all your hollowness and bones, your jagged spine and sharp shoulders, rise slowly off the mattress and I gasp; your head is snapping backward and here is what I must tell you: I’m sorry that I forgot you are dead; I forgot that I needed to support the limp lifelessness of your neck in my hand; I thought I was being so careful, giving you such dignity in our final moments together, and now your head is falling, your logical, calculating head, always seeming to brim with thoughts that you never spoke aloud, it falls hard into my cousin’s husband’s hand, which appears from nowhere with the words I caught it, and still it falls; I will always live with the feeling of it falling, straight off your neck, straight to the floor, my hands forever pinned under your back, unable to catch it before it shatters, unable to catch it before everything you didn’t say lies in shards; now, you and the old t-shirt we have clothed you in are disappearing under the zipper of a body bag; the medical students are strong; they lift you onto a gurney and button their coats as I fold the sweater from Paris; it is time to say farewell; they are waiting.
#
Matthew Trumbull lives in New Jersey with his wife and two children. His flash nonfiction writing has been featured or is forthcoming in Cleaver, Hippocampus Magazine, Short Reads, Slips Slips, and Spellbinder. He has been an award-winning solo performer and a mainstage storyteller at The Moth.