St. John's Mercy Hospital in the early, early pre-dawn hours of October 28, 1998. I had dozed off for a few minutes - just a few minutes - as I kept my vigil at Dorothy's bedside. I felt a gentle touch on my shoulder. "Mr. Kearns," the nurse said softly, "Your wife has stopped breathing." From that second on, nothing in the world would ever be the way it was supposed to be.
This was Dorothy's third stay in the hospital in the last two months - two months marked with bouts of vomiting, a heart attack, diarrhea, blood in the stool, severe anemia, discomfort, pain, weeping edema, a breakdown of kidney and liver functions, and a final assault on her body by a staph infection; two months in which life for Dorothy never took a step for the better, but day by day ever got worse.
The details of our lives together during that time are ours alone to know. It was a period of intense sharing of souls. We were closer then than we had ever been in our forty-seven years together. We were closer then than any two people could ever have been.
Four days earlier, while she was in the emergency room on this last visit to the hospital, as we waited for her to be taken upstairs to a room, I held her hand in mine - more a touch than a hold, because of the needles and all. On an impulse I said, "I love you Dorothy."
Somehow, a window of consciousness opened. She turned her head towards me. "I love you, too, Gordon," she said. That was the last sentence she would ever speak.
Dorothy was one of the few people I've ever known who really appreciated life. The world is the less without her. But it's also terribly sad that in whatever paradise she now resides she isn't able to enjoy her world.
I dedicate these pages to Dorothy.
For more about this beautiful person please click here
