“Beep…beep…beep…”

Again and again it came, that thin metallic cry, sharp as a blade drawn slowly across glass, the sort of sound that does not merely enter the ear but scrapes against the spirit. It was small, mechanical, pitiless—and yet it filled the whole room, as if the machine had become a grim little cantor set to sing only one note until death itself answered.

“Beep…beep…beep…”

Then the bedside monitor, faithful in its cold devotion, began to offer up the final bars of its grotesque one-note hymn. I watched the green line falter, hesitate, then surrender its motion altogether. My eyes trembled shut of their own accord when I saw the bottom line go flat, as if even the body can sometimes no longer bear what the soul already knows.

Barbara and I had left home the afternoon before, chasing the frail hope of arriving at Nassau County Medical Center while her mother still lingered among the living. It mattered more than ordinary language can say. Barbara had been kept by circumstance from standing at her father’s bedside when he crossed over, and the thought that she might also miss her beloved mother’s leaving pressed against her heart like a millstone. So we drove not merely across miles, but against time itself, every passing exit and traffic light seeming to ask whether love would arrive before death did.

By mercy, it did.

We stood there at her bedside with the rest of Marian’s children and family gathered near, a small circle of love drawn tightly around a life that had spent itself so generously. Nearly three years of waning strength had brought her to this final room. Three days earlier she had been admitted with internal bleeding of unknown origin, a phrase so clinical and pale it seemed unequal to the sorrow it carried. Her blood pressure had dropped to forty-five over twenty. One family member, trying to give plain speech to an unbearable mystery, said softly, “At ninety years of age, things just stop working.”

And perhaps that is true. But it never feels like “things.” It feels like a world.

 
We leaned toward her as if proximity itself were prayer, as if nearness could bargain with the inevitable. Hands reached for inches. Shoulders brushed. Sixteen eyes moved back and forth between the red cardiac tracings and the mother who lay beneath them in morphine-wrapped peace. The lines stretched, weakened, vanished, returned, then thinned again. Each mark the monitor made upon its screen seemed to write some dreadful sentence that only the living could read. Behind the curtain of the ICU cubicle, horror came not with thunder, but line by line.

Then the nurse, kind and helpless in the ancient way of all who tend the dying, spoke the words that are never new and never less hollow for being familiar.

“I’m so sorry for your loss.”

Loss. Such a small word for so heavy a thing.

Grief, they say, comes from an old word for burden, and burden is right. It descended then with a terrible gravity, not dramatic, not loud, but crushing all the same. Tears mingled cheek to cheek. Arms folded around one another instinctively, as though the body knows what the mind cannot yet frame—that sorrow is sometimes too heavy for one spine alone, and so we borrow strength from one another just to remain standing.

The next forty-eight hours, by a strange mercy, were given over to necessity. There were florists to call, funeral directors to meet, arrangements to discuss beneath the fluorescent lights of practical sorrow. There were phones to lift and voices to steady for the long-dreaded task of telling the same tear-soaked story again and again: “she is gone, she is gone, she is gone.” Repetition does not soften grief, but it gives it rails to run on.

The visitation was held in the same room where Marian’s husband, Arthur, had been honored home twenty years earlier. The symmetry of it seemed almost too tender to bear. In the house he had built, she had lived out her remaining days; now, in the very place where he once lay mourned and remembered, she rested in quiet beauty herself. Time had made a circle of love and absence. She lay there lovely and still, as if sleep had borrowed the dignity of death and adorned it with peace.

Her children had little to trouble themselves over. Mom and Dad, in one final gesture of care, had already seen to nearly everything. Even now, from the far edge of mortal reach, they were still making the road easier for those who remained behind. Love does that. It keeps arranging the furniture of mercy even as it prepares to leave the room.

And now, at long last, they were together again.

“There is a love beyond all that is told,
When two, who are blessed with one earthly tie,
With minds never changing and hearts never cold,
Love on through all ills, Love on till they die.”

 
In the days that followed, I overheard three nearly identical remarks in three different conversations. Only after the machinery of dying had done its grim work, only after the calls were made and the arrangements settled and the first hard edge of shock had been blunted by duty, people began to exhale. Deeply. Audibly. Almost with surprise.

“I was waiting to be able to do that,” one person said.

Others said much the same.

And I found myself pondering the sigh.

Why this deep and sudden releasing of breath? Why this ancient, involuntary gesture that seems to rise from someplace deeper than speech? Grief is not orderly; it does not walk in straight lines. It comes with numbness, tears, emptiness beneath the ribs, weakened knees, shortened breath, and a strange compulsion to sigh from the center of oneself. It seemed, in those days, that we were all sighing—quietly, constantly, like bellows worn thin by fire.

Scientists tell us the sigh is the body’s reset button, a means by which the respiratory system loosens what stress has tightened, a way of reopening the tiny air sacs in the lungs when breathing has become shallow and constrained. A sigh, they say, restores rhythm. It is the body’s way of beginning again.

There is something beautiful in that. Something almost merciful.

At the very hours when life feels most merciless, when sorrow narrows the chest and the world seems less breathable than it was before, the body itself performs a small liturgy of renewal. A sigh enters like grace without announcement. It loosens what grief has clenched. It reminds the lungs of how to open. It whispers to the flesh what the soul cannot yet believe: begin again, begin again.

And how many thousands of sighs attend the long labor of mourning? How many rise uncounted through those first months, those first holidays, those first birthdays and anniversaries that arrive carrying absence like an extra weight in their hands? Those who study grief estimate it can take eighteen to twenty-four months for the average soul to mend after such a wound. No wonder Robin Trower sang of “a long time crossin’ this Bridge of Sighs.” Some passages are not traversed in strides but in breaths.

The day of Marian’s burial came the week before Thanksgiving. New York wore the cold brightness of late autumn, that stern and lovely kind of day when the sky seems scrubbed clean and the light falls hard upon the earth. She was to be laid beside her beloved Artie, a reunion she had anticipated with quiet joy for some time. Family and a few faithful friends followed her to that holy ground, gathering there beneath the solemn sky as though grief itself had pitched its tent among them.

And there, in the chill of that clear day, they embraced as one.

What else can we do in such moments but weep with those who weep? Tears are a language older than eloquence and they said everything words could not say. They ran down faces that day like testimony. No one weeps this way for monsters. We grieve for goodness. We mourn beauty and loveliness lost. We lament the sudden vacuum left behind when a life of gentleness, warmth, humor, patience and peace is taken from the visible world.

 
I have joked in easier times that if you stick your arm into a bucket of water and pull it out, the size of the hole left behind is how much people will miss you when you’re gone. Perhaps for some of us that will prove true. But not for souls like Marian.

There are people whose absence does not close over.

There are those who leave no mere ripple but a changed shoreline. Their kindness continues as weather in the lives of others. Their memory burns softly in household habits, in family sayings, in holiday recipes, in the instinct to comfort, in the reflex to make room, in the gentleness passed like an heirloom from heart to heart. Such people do not disappear. They go on living where love has made a home for them—in the inward rooms of all they tended well.

“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God.”

And surely she was one of those.

Though sighing is appointed to us all, though every life will one day come to such wintered hours, I pray that God works His miracles especially for those who cannot cease from their sighing—those bent beneath sorrow so long that breath itself feels borrowed, those who stand in the ruins of love and cannot yet imagine spring.

For grief is winter. It strips the branch. It silences the field. It takes what bloomed in warmth and lays it down beneath a sky gone iron-gray. It persuades the heart that color has fled for good.

Yet winter is never the final word.

When winter comes into our lives
With its uncertain sound,
To strip us of our warmth and joy,
Like petals on the ground,

We may be tempted to give up;
To fold beneath life’s storm.
We may be tempted to forsake
The hope which keeps us warm.

But we must learn to stand up tall;
To always face the sun,
And patiently await the day
When winter’s work is done.

For winter winds will cease to howl,
The snows will melt away,
And we shall see the beauty of
Another summer’s day.

And we will have renewed our strength
When summer’s wind first blows,
For God will whisper once again
The promise of a rose.

—Glenda Fulton Davis