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Dictionary for the Dying

Michael Neal Morris

 

Language escapes me, so I can’t easily discuss my wife killing me. So be it.

Cuckold: a man who has failed to satisfy his wife and thus deserves to have her cheat on him. Some might say that the worst sentence a man could hear is, "I'm in love with another man."  Hah.  She could say, "I'm not in love with this man."  Or she could say nothing, just quote whatever decade it presently is in defense of her freedom.

Or she could say, "I had an affair with someone who has given me AIDS and...."

I'm told that I've clung to an old-fashioned idea of the institution of marriage.  Accept: to expect of others what your conviction (read "guilt") keeps you from doing.

 

 

"Thank God no children were involved," my sister told me.

"What kind of stupid thing is that to say?" I snapped.

"I'm sorry," she said.  "I just thought that at least there won't be any children who are left behind to suffer.  People who might try to make sense of this tragedy."

Child: person of not legal age who is a burden to those who must care for them after the death of their parents.

This little conversation happened some time after my wife entered the hospital for the last time.  My sister was silent when I originally told her about the liaison and its results.  She looked at me as if I was a Martian for such a long time that I wondered if the news had frozen her.

"Sis?" I asked.

She shook herself.  Then her face twisted into an angry, indignant expression.

"I suspected as much.  I never trusted her," she said.  Already, she was speaking of my wife in the past tense.

Actually, she always loved my wife.  In fact, they were close friends from college.  She introduced her to me one weekend when she brought some of her friends home.  I was sitting in the kitchen, sipping a cup of coffee, talking to Mom about some shutters she wanted me to build for her, when in walks my sister in her night shirt, her friend following shyly behind until she saw a man in the room.

"Come on, it's the eighties," she told my future wife, who had backed out of the room.  "Besides, it's just my brother."

 

 

After breaking the news (what an ironic phrase!) to me, my wife went into the bedroom and began packing her things.  I asked her why and she said she supposed I wouldn't want her around anymore.  I told her I didn't know for sure what I wanted, except for her to stay.  I have no idea why I did, since I never again saw her as the garden of my joys.  Let the experts figure it out.  Enough sure tried.

She thought at first that I just wanted to make her suffer more by having to look every day at what she did to me.  She expected me to taunt her and tell her what an imp I thought she was, and when I was silent, she got angry with me.

"You hate me for making a simple mistake, and you want to torture me with your brooding," she would say.  Torture: to remind one by everyday actions or very presence of one's fallen state.  "You can't wait to see me die so you can spit on my grave!"

But she had already died, as far as I could see.  When my own test came back positive, I buried her.  Now she was just someone I lived with, like some symbiotic ghost who needed to haunt me for a specified time in order for her soul to be released.

My father thought I stayed so I could torture myself.  "You blame yourself for what happened, so you are letting her stay as some sort of penance for not satisfying her in bed," he said a couple weeks before she died.  "But she's a slut and a whore, son.  And there's nothing you could have done about it."  Whore: woman married to a cuckold.

 

 

I won't lie.  I can't say that the first few times I made digs at her infidelity (I once kissed her forehead and called her the angel of death) that I didn't feel a certain amount of pleasure.  I was like a man who knows that violence won’t improve a bad situation but wants to punch the smugness off the face of humanity, saying, "But it will make me feel sooooo good."

Actually, it never felt good. Pleasure: the opposite of pain, or the feeling one gets when reacting to pain by causing pain.  Before long even the sick joy of insulting her stopped.  For awhile, I just stayed silent, and that set her off.  Then she went through her own insult stage.  When her death was certain, perhaps six months before, she also tired of our fights.  Then we coexisted, declining together.

 

 

I spoke with her parents shortly before she died.  She was in the hospital, and I went to see her each day, more probably from habit than love or duty.  They urged me to forgive her.  "After all," her mother informed me, "we are none of us perfect." Her father added: "And you'll certainly regret missing the opportunity once it is passed.  You could then have a clear conscience."  Forgiveness: disguising sin as imperfection so  that those left behind might believe that the dead went to heaven and went there in peace.

 

 

So did I forgive her at the end? It’s hard to say.  I resolved to avoid both tenderness and hate. I sat next to her each day, waiting for her to go.  We spoke very little and before too long it was like we had spent all our married life in this hospital room.

I was reading a magazine when she awoke and grasped my hand.  I couldn’t remember when we had last touched.  I stood.

"I am so sorry," she said in a wafer-thin voice.

My hand went instinctively to brush away hair I had hoped I'd see grey someday.  Remembering that, I said, "It's alright," and I kissed her forehead.

Then her breath became as fragile as I knew my own time to be, and I let her go.

 

 

This is not to say that sometimes I haven't had to fight the urge to spit on her grave. I go there often, sometimes bringing flowers, though for the first few visits I added an obscenity to the petals I lay at her fresh headstone.  Mine, next to hers with its unfinished date, seemed to pull the words from me.

 

 

           Grief: The recurring eureka sensation that comes when one becomes suddenly aware of solitude.

 


            Michael Neal Morris attended East Texas State University (now Texas A&M in Commerce) where he earned a B.A. in 1985 and an M.A. in 1995.  He teaches English at Eastfield College in Mesquite. His most recent publications include poems in Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Lynx Eye, The Concho River Review, Illya’s Honey, The Distillery and Our Journey and stories in Dogwood Tales Magazine and The GW Review. His most recent online poetry publications include works at Liberty Hill Poetry Review, The Mid-South Review, Chronogram, and Haruah.  Poems are forthcoming in Contemporary Rhyme, Subtle Tea, and T-Zone. He has worked as a secretary, technical writer, janitor, and tutor. He lives with his wife and children just outside the Dallas area. More about his work can be found at Wrestling Light. His sometimes updated blog is Monk Notes.