Undying

Loretta loved her floral-print couch since the day she saw it on the showroom floor at Buchanan's. Its tags boasted of its durability and fine Tunisian craftsmanship. There isn't a better couch in the county, the salesman told her. It was an expense back then, more than she could afford, but the delivery guys brought it the next day and she eyeballed them from the time they scooted it off the truck and fitted it carefully through the door, to the time it was placed, then replaced, in the perfect spot in her living room. 

That was 1982, and Buchanan's Furniture isn't there anymore. It was a beautiful old downtown building, white-painted brick with bold-black letters vertically down the side. It was on the historic registry, but they tore it down anyway to build a jail in its place after all those new furniture places with lesser-quality merchandise opened up on the highway. Certainly, there was no couch made with such fine taste, let alone, Tunisian craftsmanship in there, she'd think as she passed. She would only take the plastic off on occasions, when company came over. Then after they left, she would dig it out of the closet and put it back on. It is just a couch, her husband Jim would grouse. Just a couch, she'd mock. 

But since they were both loyal Reds fans, in a fit of exuberance, Loretta told Jim as they say on that couch, the plastic crinkling under them, that if the Reds won the 1990 World Series, she would take off the plastic to celebrate. Take it off and keep it off for good. As though her vowing to do so was some sort of unknown incentive for the Reds to win. Jim didn't believe her. Nor did he believe that their Reds would win that World Series, let alone sweep the powerhouse  Oakland Athletics, as he called them. A's just wasn't in his vocabulary. But sure enough, when the final pitch of the final game was thrown and the final out recorded, Loretta lived up to her word. The plastic came off for good. She even threw it away.

Receipts would concur that she bought more scotch-guard than any single consumer in the state of Ohio, and it was part of her morning routine to spray the couch. As Willard Scott was talking about the weather on The Today Show, or as Bob Barker was announcing the bids in the showcase showdown, there she was like some graffiti artist spraying her invisible graffiti. It got layers upon layers of guaranteed protection. Loretta Miller might singlehandedly be responsible for the ozone layer depleting for as much as she sprayed that couch. Starving polar bears and lost penguins have no one else to blame but her. Hoping to preserve it. Hoping that it would last forever. Pursuing, in vain, it's undying. 

The next year the Reds weren't as good as the last, and every year following, besides 94 and 95, a strike and the Braves to blame respectively for their demise, they got progressively worse until it was as though they lived in a vegetative baseball state. Then they woke back up in 99 for a year that ultimately wasn't. It was heartbreaking for Loretta and Jim, but the Reds were so bad most years, it freed up time by July when they were so far out of the playoff picture that to watch after then, especially after August, you had to be a masochist, I suppose, in that your dignity as a fan was shredded before your eyes. Then your favorite player got traded and he was gone, dying a baseball death, of sorts. Or they get old and retired, but you still recalled them and their number was always their number, even when someone else took it. But in either scenario, they were no longer part of your team or your life. I suppose going to the Dodgers or the Yankees was a sort of Heaven, but not for Loretta and Jim who still watched the Reds, even after they were out of it. And many times over those seasons, Loretta would ask herself, "I took the plastic off for this?"

She nearly had a heart attack when guests smoked and like a nervous Nelly she floated around with a couple of glass ashtrays from the factory where Jim worked, one in each hand, incessantly offering them, hoping to save her couch from a wayward ember. The factory where Jim worked made glass everything: casserole dishes, ashtrays, panes, pickle jars, coffee mugs, glass eggs, you name it. But eventually they shut down when glass could be made cheaper elsewhere and people began to favor plastic, and they were no longer deemed as a profitable industry any longer by corporations that gobbled up other corporations until it all was as impersonal as it could get. When someone died who put in 25 or 30 years of life and they didn't even send a letter, much less a bouquet of flowers to his widow. 

But Jim and Loretta managed. He took his retirement and turned their garage into a woodshop and she sold Avon and Christmas-Around-the-World and got a job at a department store where she sold perfume. They had three kids who all knew better than to soil mom's couch, even though it had plastic on it when they were kids, so they sat or lied on the floor, or on the loveseat, or in dad's ratty but comfortable chair, rather than to tempt fate on that thinly-covered couch. And they got older as Christmases and Christmas trees came and went, up and down every year and stuffed in a box, strands of lights that worked for two or three and then gave out, all tangled and limp. Then tossed in the trash with no ceremony. Ne'er a second thought. 

The tree gave out in 1994, after 30 years, and was replaced by a new and improved tree that swore it was the most realistic tree ever and that its branches were made by some modern maelable metal that was easy to bend but strong enough to hold a three-pound ornament. She felt kind of sad throwing the old tree away. Putting it in its dilapidated box one last time and watching Jim carry it to the curb like a cardboard casket, nearly as she was watching the kids grow and move away, if it hadn't been so gradual. It was as though they died as children and were born as adults who were not one in the same, but entirely different people. Sure, there was a resemblance, something in the eyes, a mannerism or two, but they were different people. Just as the jail was not Buchanan's.

And they left and fell in love and took jobs somewhere else and created their own families, and then it was Loretta and Jim as it was in the very beginning. Before the kids, before the house and Jim's job at the factory, and that couch, and the 1990 World Series, and every World Series after that came and went without the Reds. It seemed to forget them. And Loretta sold perfume, and makeup, and tupperware, and Christmas ornaments. And Jim made birdhouses, and cabinets, and rocking chairs in the garage until there was no more to sell and no more to make. The highschool where they went and met is no longer there. It was bulldozed and replaced with a new school and no one thinks of what and who was there before besides for the old people who drive by and say so. The restaurant where they had their first date is no longer selling cheeseburgers and chocolate malts. It now sells insurance. Their parents' houses are rundown and owned by new people, young tenants who don't seem to care at all who once lived there. 

Loretta lied on the couch and took a breath. You take breath for granted the majority of your life after your first. You take heartbeats and time for granted. But there comes a time when it is nearly over, when you have but one of everything left and firsts become lasts and forevers don't seem all that long. Jim knelt beside her as she lied on her couch and took her hand into his own. You don't really think of it, until it is upon you. When someone else dies, you think about it for a minute. Then you distract yourself with TV and entertainment and jobs and grocery stores and by making love in the quiet of the night. It is easier that way. He'd have rather it been him, he thought, but then knowing how it felt to be him, and not wishing for her to feel that way, he knew this is how it should be. Knowing that it is but to sleep and the only one who grieves is the one who remains to grieve. The one who gets left behind. This is the way it goes. Breaths that countdown like minutes and seconds to the New Year. To a ball dropping. To fireworks, and champagne corks flying, and kisses, and resolutions, and phone calls celebrating one more year. 

It was New Year's Eve that he sat there with her. When she told him that she didn't want him to call the ambulance this time. She didn't want to go to the hospital because she would never come home, she said. She wanted to stay home this year, she joked. She didn't want to go out for New Year's. Not this time. She smiled at him as the raucous crowd celebrated a life they surely don't appreciate on TV, live from Manhattan's Time's Square, a place itself that has lived a thousand different lives. That no two times visiting are the same. We have plenty more of these, those people think without thinking of it at all, drunk and showered in confetti. Just as Buchanan's had plenty more couches to sell, and the restaurant had plenty more malts, and the tree had plenty more Christmases left in it. We all have plenty more until we don't have any. Until we go out like a string of lights.

He sat and listened to her. She didn't talk about herself currently. How she felt. She didn't speak of fear or pain. She talked about their life and the kids. The grandkids. Christmases past. All her New Year's resolutions, as silly as they sounded now. She described nearly everything that she remembered about the first time they met, about prom, about their wedding and honeymoon. She disclosed fears she had never disclosed. Hopes she had. Dreams that came to fruition and others that did not. And he held her hand and listened as he always listened. He had forgotten some of the things she recalled. And, in turn, he told her things he remembered, some of which she had forgotten. And it was as though for one night, not being interrupted by nurses or the buzzing and whirring  of artificial-life machines, they lived all those years all over again. 

There are no adequate words you'll find in the end. Nothing you can prepare in advance or that is already written for you to read. This life is a candle that burns until there is no more wick. But he said what he felt, and although it represented poorly that which truly was, he spoke in reverence for his beautiful wife as she lay dying.

"I love you forever. Thank you for giving me the one thing I couldn't have lived without," he said. 

"This fine Tunisian-crafted couch?" she chuckled.  

"You," he smiled.

"I will love you forever," she replied, spending her last breath. As the old year passed and a New Year was born, as does everything, did she. In like a lion, out like a lamb as we all shall go. It wasn't just a couch. It never was just a couch. Everything is more than what it is, and less than what it isn't. Love is eternal and doesn't pass. Love is forever. Love is undying.