You’ve heard the stories for years about my friend Marjorie suffering from breast cancer: a disease that metastasized from breast to bone to lungs to liver to spinal column. But I’ve really never told you about her husband.
Keith stood by Marjorie for the seven long years of the stage 4 cancer diagnosis, a cancer that had actually surfaced 14 years ago, and then reared its ugly head seven years later. When I visited Marjorie in the intensive care unit, Keith was there. When I came to the gamma knife procedure, he was there, too. When I went to the hospice, he was standing beside her bed. I saw what a toll this illness had taken on him as well as her. I told him to leave. He walked the halls. He ran out to Bob Evans to get a salad, a salad he then tried to feed Marjorie upon his return. I believe it was her last taste of food.
The final wish Marjorie had before losing consciousness on that late October Sunday was that she return home so she could die in her own bed. She said this in between morphine- driven naps. It was the last wish Keith could fulfill for his bride of 25 years. And no, it wasn’t her very own bed she died in, rather a hospital bed in the family room that she decorated herself, with yellow walls and blue and yellow overstuffed furniture and floral curtains sewn by Marjorie’s hands. She died in that room three days later.
It’s been three months now since Marjorie’s passing. Since then, I have taken on the task of helping Keith survive. I call him every few days or he calls me. Sometimes we cry together. Sometimes we remember. Although Marjorie has a sister, he says that I was much more of one. Helping Keith is the last favor I can do for my friend.
The other day when we were talking, he mentioned the Persian rug in their living room, a room which he describes now as a shrine to Marjorie’s family with all the assorted family furniture, photos and trinkets assembled there.
“You know her aunt’s old Persian rug is worn on one side,” he said.
Why is it worn, I asked?
“It’s where Marjorie knelt to pray,” he said.
I could picture her there in my mind’s eye, with her Princess Diana beauty and her tall, waifish figure, and her eyes closed and head bent in solemn communion with God. I had no words.
A Persian carpet worn to bare thread from kneeling in prayer. Now that’s something beautiful, don’t you think? That’s what I call faith. And isn’t it wonderful that her husband noticed?
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