Once again, my brain is full of mental tape loops racing around and repeating and repeating in my head.

The main images in my mind today are the things Betty didn’t get to do. In the freezer are the frozen packs of tilapia fish Betty wanted to cook. She fell in love with tilapia during her second stay at Spring Creek. She planned on getting back into cooking. She bought a big box of all sorts of special pots and pans suitable for using on the burners on our stove. She never even opened the box.

I remember one day when she sat in the kitchen with one of her occupational therapists frying some eggs. She was supposed to be showing the therapists how much she was progressing. The irony was, she WAS progressing. Betty would come home from her latest round of hospital, then therapy, and spend a few weeks or a month doing her best to get around. To go shopping once in a while and ride around in a motorized cart. To ride around with Cheryl and look at houses. Once, she rode on her hover-round across Mountain Road to visit Barb. Many weeks, she was doing so well.

We all knew she was just dreaming, but she said many times she wanted to drive again. After she sold our car, she said many times she had “seller’s remorse.” Our doctor told her that getting her license back wasn’t in the cards. I often thought I shouldn’t pooh-pooh the notion too much. She needed hope.


* * * * *

Tonight, I finished the last pack of her peanut butter crackers she was supposed to take to dialysis. The top drawer in the fridge still contains some small cans of tomato juice and her much loved “gingy ale.” She has more “gingy ale” under her desk in the kitchen.

“Gingy ale” replaced “lemmy-ade” as her favorite drink sometime late last year. I don’t know why or when, but suddenly I didn’t have to mix her Crystal Light packets into her bottles of water anymore.

* * * *

I think a lot about Betty’s last coherent days in Spring Creek. I recall one day when she pushed a tube of Goldbond into my hands. She wanted me to rub it on her cracked fingers where all those needles had pricked her fingertips. She was so tired of that.

I remember one time she requested a Coke. We told her she couldn’t have one. “What difference does it make now?” she asked angerly. There was nothing she resented more than being told what to do. Looking back, I wish we’d have given her that Coke. I think that was one of those moments she was signaling she knew what was coming.

I remember our last prayer together. She concluded it by saying, “I know I’m coming home soon.”

I was very afraid of what I heard. “When you say home,” I asked, “you mean our home, don’t you?”

“Yes,” she lied. She knew what was coming. She so wanted what was coming.

* * * * *

I’ve also found my mind wandering back to so many death scenes in my life before Betty. For one, back in 1979, my girlfriend was a blonde with a Dutch hair-cut, I think they called it, named Margie Linden. I was 26, she was 33, a survivor of childhood rheumatic fever. She had the first pacemaker I ever felt under her right breast.

Margie had moved to Dallas from California in order to be close to the surgeon who had saved her life. He had replaced valves in her heart with pig heart parts, the practice of the day, I presume. Margie always told pig jokes about herself which I can barely remember now.

One day, she didn’t want anything to do with me anymore. That happened after I proposed to her in her little room and she brought over a box full of medical bills.

“No one,” I exclaimed, working my way through the thick stack, “could pay this off in a lifetime!”

She nodded. “That would be my dowry, Wesley. A lifetime obligation.”

I later understood she had distanced herself from me because she knew she was on borrowed time. This came into sharp focus when she called me from a nursing home. I went in to see her. My lover was a walking blue skeleton staying close to an oxygen machine. A 33-year-old blue skinned woman in a home meant for old people. Not long after that, Margie went home to California to die.

Many years later, Betty claimed she saw Margie’s spirit once in our Penn St. apartment. We were pretty new together in those days. She said she saw Margie stretching her legs across my lap on the couch. “She had really long legs,” Betty said. “She approves of us together.”

I must say, losing a girlfriend of a year or so doesn’t come close to being like losing a wife of nearly twenty. Take my word for it.

* * * * * *

May 29 is coming fast, and that’s an important date for the Brittons. May 29 was the day my brother David Britton was born in Denver, May 29 was the day David Britton died in Dallas. The coroner ruled the death a suicide. I know Dad came to accept that, I’m not sure my Mother ever did.

I vividly recall going to David’s apartment to help get his things and found a brown spot on the living room floor. “That’s your brother’s blood,” my Dad said. “His head was all black, I didn’t think it was him at first. That blood came out of a crack in his mouth.”

The horror of it all hit me. My Dad had gone over to collect David for his birthday and he was the one to find his son dead on the floor. For years, I thought that was the most horrible moment of my life.

Betty told me several times she talked with David in the afterlife. This was most frequent after we started having problems with David’s daughter, Lori. “The apple doesn’t fall very far from the tree,” she said David told her. O.K.

* * * * *

Dave was buried in a section of a cemetery where my Dad’s mother and one of his brothers were already buried. In time, both Mom and Dad were buried nearby. I’m the only one of us who won’t end up there. The cemetery director kept trying to convince me to buy a lot, but there was no way I could afford it. Then or now.

I plan on being cremated and my ashes put in Betty’s purple urn. I also plan on putting Clipper’s ashes in that urn when that time comes. I hope when my time comes, I’ll have some funds to cover my cremation. At the very least. At least, that’s my plan in 2018.

No wonder sleep is hard.