A close friend of mine who is currently caring for an aging parent who may be in the last months or weeks of her life asked me if it was possible to grieve before someone has passed away. I told her that it often happens because we regret the loss of what someone was and what might soon to come.
Baptism
We’d been divorced for over twenty years. At the time we divorced, we were pretty angry at one another. I wished only ill toward my soon to be ex-wife, hoping her life would collapse without me, but over time, we mellowed, realized our roles in the breakup and moved on.
Albuquerque is a small town of about seven hundred thousand people. It has the trappings of a large metropolis, but really, the vibe here is provincial. We all say hello, tend to be courteous to one another and friendly to tourists and strangers. It’s unnerving for some. It’s also not unusual to run into someone you grew up with still here after all these years, working in their father’s business and living in the family home. Conversely, you might go years without seeing someone who was pivotal in your life, a first love, a best friend, an ex-wife.
Over the years, I didn’t see much of my ex. We had moved on to other pursuits. I got married again and raised a pack of dogs. She adopted a pet iguana named Shuge (short for “sugar”) and entered into the nursing profession, something that surprised me. She had always had an aversion to illness of any kind. Every now and then, we’d run into each other at the home of a mutual friend or at the occasional funeral. She was still tall and pretty, a gorgeous Black woman who had modeled briefly when she was nineteen, a full afro cut that began to gray as she got older.
In recent years, I heard from her more frequently. Sometimes she needed money, sometimes information or non-monetary help. A few years ago, I heard that she had lung cancer. She had smoked as long as I had known her. She had had a small stroke that led to the diagnosis. The bad luck I had once wished upon her had landed with a full and terrible force.
I was driving home from the gym one day when I got a call from her. A mutual friend, had passed away and she had promised to spread his ashes near his favorite fishing hole in the mountains, but her health would not allow the trip. Would I be willing to do this for her? It had been months since I had spoken with her. She told me she had moved and, as it happened, her home was on my route home. I stopped to pick up the remains and couldn’t believe what I found. She was thin, her beautiful hair gone, her face sallow and drawn, a result of the chemotherapy.
I took the ashes to the lake the following weekend and returned with pictures of the location. After that, I went to see her once a week. She had been given six weeks to live in the spring and quit her chemo treatments. The day after Halloween, I went to visit her. Her hair had grown back, all gray now and she was thinner than ever. She was on oxygen because her lungs were filled with tumors that limited the amount of air she could take in. This made her a little spacey. The day after Halloween, I asked how she was doing, she grinned and said, “I’m still here!” She was six months past her expiration date.
Withing the month, her condition deteriorated. She moved herself into a nursing facility that offered hospice care. Brand new, elegant décor and somewhat overstaffed, it was still a nursing home, populated with the hopelessly aged, the chronically infirm and the abandoned. Residents who were able wheeled themselves up and down the spider-legged hallways into common areas, the dining hall and a recreation center that was of virtually no use to anyone. Every now and then I would hear the children of these aging parents still trying to sell them on the nursing home. “Wow! What a nice TV,” or “Hey, that lunch looks good!”
My ex was situated in a semi-private room with a woman who was prone to fits of dementia. On bad days, she would howl non-stop for the certified nursing assistant, “CNA! CNA!” The space between the two beds was divided only by a thin curtain. The onslaught was relentless. During one visit, she was particularly vocal. “CNA! CNAAAAAAAAAA! My leg is hurting! Help me! Help me.” My ex was not fully cognizant. The cancer had spread to her brain and the tumors in her lungs severely limited the amount of oxygen her brain got. She would tire easily and would drift in and out of consciousness, a blessing considering her neighbor.
“CNA! CNAAAAAAAAAAAAAAYIYIYIYIYIYI! My hands are itching. I need to be covered up!” After much wailing, someone would come into the room to mollify her, ten seconds after the attendant would leave, she would start again. “CNA! CNA! I need help. I’m in pain. Ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow! I need my medicine.” Her cries would grow louder and more desperate. She drew out each syllable, elongating them to make her point. She would scream and scream and scream until someone came and then the process would start all over again.
Shifting uncomfortably in her wheelchair, I asked my ex if she needed to go to the bathroom. She nodded weakly. I helped her up and we shuffled together to the toilet where I helped her with her clothing. She sat in silence, staring blankly at the wall, her roommate’s cries muffled but still audible and constant. I tried to break the awful awkwardness in the room and keep my ex from drifting away.
“Do you remember the camping trip we took to Percha dam down south?” Percha is Spanish for perch and was gathering place for hundreds of native New Mexico birds of all types. We loved to camp and this was a new location for us, sparsely populated with campers because of the lack of shade and abundance of bugs, the reason, it turned out, that so many birds gathered there.
“I remember us lying in the tent just as the sun was coming up. It must have been five in the morning.” I’m sobbing now, regretting the loss of everything we were then. “As the sun came up, one by one the birds began singing until every bird in the area was squawking, loudly. I remember thinking about how beautiful a moment this was.” My tears were flowing, unrelenting as she sat there unaware of me or the memory of that morning. “All of a sudden you sat up and yelled SHUT THE FUCK UP and every bird within the sound of your voice immediately went silent. I never saw anything like that in my whole life.” I was laughing, now, through my tears. “I half expect you to do the same thing now and cure that crazy woman on the other side of that curtain,” I said.
I waited until I was sure she was finished using the toilet, cleaned her up and lead her back to her space where I put her into bed. She drifted off to sleep, unfazed by the lonely rage of the elderly woman who needed only company to keep her quiet, maybe forgotten by whatever family and friends she may have had at one time.
I sat with my ex for a while longer, my tears flowing occasionally. I prayed the rosary, told her that it was okay to let go and that God has prepared a place for her that is better than anything I had ever promised her, anything I could have ever given to her had I fulfilled my promises to her. I told her that God has forgiven her for anything she might have had regrets about and I confessed my regrets about us and apologized once again for all my mistakes, all the pride that led to our demise.
As I stood to go, I dipped my thumb into the half full plastic cup of water and drew it across her forehead three times in the sign of the cross the way that the priest in my elementary school told us we should do for someone who was about to die. In a simpler time, it was a ticket to heaven and it was all I had left to give her.
“I baptize you in the name of the father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.”
Copyright 2025 by Jose Antonio Ponce