The Love That Lies Beneath

He watched his wife’s decline into illness over the years with a great sadness. Gone was the bright-eyed woman, full of drive and enthusiasm, their life once spontaneous now a regimented schedule of medication and her rest times. For years the doctors said there’s nothing wrong although they both knew she was ill, her body and mind in complete collapse. Her slow slip into disability these last few months seemed to accelerate, her skin grey, deep black circles surrounding her concaving eyes, her weight falling off as her body wasted away. She needed help she was being refused, his frustration growing by the day and then erupting in the instant their lives changed. BANG! The abscess that had been poisoning her burst and so did every way of living they knew.

She clung to his hand in the frantic environment of the ambulance, saying over and over the words they said several times a day - “I love you”. She meant it as much as the first time she said it, as much as she did every day, and she truly meant it now maybe it would be the last time. A burning red sensation swept over her body, redness racing across her vision as she slipped into unconsciousness. She felt like she was slipping under water icey cold, drowning, and then completely submerged under a pond covered by a thick layer of impenetrable ice. She bashed against it, desperately trying to break through before hopelessness took over and she slipped further down. Alone for the first time in the eighteen years she’d been basking in the love only he could give, their bond one found in classic tales of romance, now she felt an incomparable coldness, her heart sinking and no longer singing as it is every time they touched.

Although she could not hear, she could on some level sense when those were around her. The clinical presence of doctors and nurses poking her, a restriction in her breathing as the ventilator mask was put on, a feeling of familiarity as her family were by her bedside. She called for help from beneath the ice covering the frozen pond but it became to feel futile. Her husband visited her daily and came up with the idea of playing their wedding song, massaging her face and feet, stroking the parts of her hands not hooked up to an a IV. She began to feel a strange sense of comfort among the fear she could not quite place until it dawned on her - it was him. She swam to the surface layer of the frozen pond, bashing it ferociously all the time thinking “go to him”. In the moment he saw her finger twitch, a flicker in her eyes. He turned up the music, kissed her forehead and whispered “come on baby, you can do it”. She felt a warmth for the first time, a sweet relief from being frozen to her core. Cracking the ice started to feel like it wouldn’t work and she slipped lower but then the spark came to give one final big push.

Her fist crashed through the ice and all of a sudden there was his hand on hers, lights, noise, seeing she was hooked up to machines but as her vision focused she saw his face, both their eyes flashed with brightness and pure love as she saw his face, heard his voice and felt like she always did when they were curled up together, like she was home. His face looked tired and worn from weeks of sleepless nights, even in the moment of waking up from her nightmare she wanted to care for him, a feeling of worry without knowing what happened to her. She described what she felt as she lay beneath that frozen pond which was met by most with discredulous faces but he believed her. They vowed to keep each other warm for all their days, and they did.