(I handed out candy to trick-or-treaters as Princess Leia... after changing costumes three times. x3)
The minute hand on the clock was slowly ticking its way towards the eleventh hour on October 29, 2015: and she was fading fast. The doctors had told me she would not live through the night after this sudden relapse in the fatal illness- and as I shivered in the winds of the Halloween night, I came face to face with a phantom of terror and dread. I sat in a steel chair at the bedside, holding the hand of the love of my life and gently smoothing her long reddish hair, listening to her laboured breathing.
A nurse entered at that moment, casting a sympathetic glance at me and then at the clock. "Wouldn't you like to step outside for awhile, sir?" she suggested hesitantly, for I had been vigil at the bedside for hours unnumbered. I shook my head emphatically and the nurse took the cue to leave. Stealing the precious seconds, I leaned over and gently kissed my wife's moist forehead, and to my elation her brilliant blue eyes blinked open. She smiled up at me, very weakly and sweetly, and then slowly reached her hand out: I clasped it in my own, and my heart throbbed as a look of desperate helplessness washed over her face- she was trying so hard to tell me something and I could not understand her. "What is it, honey?" I asked softly, smoothing the hair back from her beautiful face and peering down into it through my tears.
She looked up at me and gave my hand one eloquent, feeble squeeze, and then her eyes fluttered closed with a gentle breath. Beside me, the red lines on the heart monitor flickered and went flat: at precisely the same moment that the clock struck midnight. My beloved was dead. How could all this have happened? An agony more visceral than anything I had ever known gashed my being like a knife, and almost senselessly I kicked the stand bearing all the monitors, sending it crashing into the wall with a thousand shards of glass and metal. The doctors had not been able to save her, not even the greatest and most experienced. I had not been able to save her. She was gone.
The funeral was held two days later in the wake of a raging thunderstorm, blasting the little country graveyard with turbulent winds and veils of blinding rain. Very few relatives and friends had shown today, likely because of the weather; it was just me, my wife's sister Lily, and a few of our closest chums from church and such. The minister, clad in raincoat and bearing an umbrella, squinted at his Bible through the gloom of the storm, shouting the lines to be heard over the wind.
(Still WIP.)