Rolf Westerling looked for a final time at the faces of his three children. They were gathered around his bedside, heads bowed as if nodding off, a sniff from his youngest, the nervous tick of his eldest’s perennial throat-clearing, while the middle child hummed a simple tune that Rolf didn’t recognize. They were his—the sum total of his worldly existence now that their mother was gone—and the warmth of their nearness now gave him the comfort he needed to step out into the beyond.
As the hum of air conditioning melted into the audible thrumming of the room’s white noise, he embraced the ineffable silence and then, closing his eyes, he left the silence behind. He wondered if a slide show of his 87 years would unreel before him…if he would witness his earliest childhood memories of growing up just outside of Stockholm, of coming to America by boat with his parents and six siblings, settling in western New York State, working at his parents’ dry goods store, bumbling through high school as a social outcast but solid student, meeting Dora one night at a bridge club gathering and falling head over heels in love, the joy surrounding the birth of each of their three children, the ache of losing a fourth in childbirth, the pride of maintaining and growing the family business, of establishing the Westerlings as part of the bedrock of their middleclass community, of being able to share the smiles and greetings of everyone he met on the streets of town, of marrying off his two daughters to loving husbands and their raising children of their own—his grandbabies—and of them moving along life’s paths with purposeful, if not always steady, gaits. Losing Dora to cancer and the loneliness that followed was almost unbearable, but life itself, as she promised in her last letter to him, would go on without her. And sadly, for a time, it did.
But these were life flashes that all had come before…especially when he knew the end was near. Along with visits from his children and lifelong friends, they were a precious balm and helped Rolf acknowledge and accept the gradual transition from the life he knew to whatever existed on the other side.
Leaving the silence behind, he rose from the bed. Slowly, smoothly, serenely he rose, first a foot, then five—looking down on the poor mortal coil that lay emaciated and inert under the sheets below him. What they do with me now is their affair, he said to himself, for I am free from that care and all other worldly concerns. I am now the ether. An idea no longer made of human flesh. A memory, perhaps, for some. But more so now, I become an essential element of the cosmos. Transparent, but no less alive, no less a part of the spirituality of the living, no less a thread in the tapestry of life, even though I am no longer among the living.
Rolf again looked down on his children, each now realizing that their father’s time had come and gone. Kristina, the middle child and most independent, stopped her humming and issued a deep sigh. Karen, the youngest and most sentimental, stood and bent herself over his body, her tears dripping upon his greying face. Karl, the eldest, stood, looked toward the ceiling of the sparely furnished room, and then moved toward the sunlit window at the foot of the bed.
“It’s time,” he said softly, raising the lower sash of the double-hung window and murmuring once again, “It’s time to let him go.”
He looked lovingly at his two sisters and smiled.
Thompson Wainwright is retired from a long career in corporate communications in Boston’s financial services industry. He lives in southeastern Massachusetts with his wife and a recalcitrant dog named Beans.
