Read Online Life After Life by Jill McCorkle - Free Book Online Page A

her promise to him to be here, to stay here, was the only thing holding her in place. “I will haunt you if you break your word to me,” he said, still incredibly handsome and able to smile right up to the end. “I will make your life more miserable than it has ever been.”
    “Whoa,” she had said, and stepped back from his bed. “That’s a tall order.” She waited for him to say something else, but he didn’t. “A mean order,” she added, leaning forward with the word mean and still nothing.
    “Your mother said you chose to be in the doghouse,” her dad had said, but he did not add the sentence that had so often come out of one of her parents’ mouths: You made your bed, now lie in it. Or when she ran from what appeared to them a perfectly good life with a man she was lucky to marry to a relationship as quick and damaging as an electrical storm: Lie down with dogs and get up with fleas. “Yes, you chose the doghouse,” he said, the air reeking of onions. His old white apron—one her mother had once worn—was splotched with condiments, and she noticed how tired he looked and how his hands were smaller than she had remembered. “You did it all by yourself.”
    When she was twenty, she would have argued with him; she would have yelled that they were rigid ignorant people who only cared about what everybody else thought—the neighbors, the relatives, the people at church—who gave a damn? Why couldn’t they just care about her ? Why, when she got ninety-nine out of a hundred correct, were they so quick to study and scrutinize the one little failure, so much attention given to what was wrong instead of what was right, and when she was thirty she still would have gotten angry but would have just slammed the door or the phone receiver and taken it out on whatever poor soul was with her at the time, whatever they were doing in that moment—eating a holiday dinner, making love, planting trees—ruined and lost to that cavernous black hole. She would have had an extra drink or two and blamed her parents for the excess, but in her midforties, after life with Luke, she was finally able to see her father for what he was: a worn-out man who had worked very hard and lived the only way he knew how, rigid and unforgiving from his own upbringing, too scared to have ever ventured beyond that knowledge, frightened by the thought of death, ashamed of his weak nakedness, and in need of love with no sense of how to ask for it.
    “Those are the ones who will need you the most,” Luke had pointed out, and sure enough, early in her training as a hospice volunteer, this became all too evident. Now it’s a scene she sees often as she sits bedside by those who have reached their final destination. It is a very simple equation that comes at the end, a focus on what they have and what they don’t have —a glass half full or empty—a weighing of one against the other. Sometimes the focus is just the magnification of what has always been there. But always, they are waiting for something: a face, a word, an apology, permission, a touch. Bics flicking with a frenzied vengeance at the great rock concert of life for just one more. One more song, word, sip of water. Some have many hands reaching from the bedside and others have none, and yet in that final moment, the air heavy and laden as molecules regroup and reshape in preparation for the exit, it is all the same. It is like the moment when a snake enters the yard and the birds fall silent. The silence begs your attention; it’s time to go. The journey is over.
    “It’s okay,” she told her dad and ran an ice chip around his dry lips, his mouth turning toward the touch like a newborn seeking milk. “All my experience in the doghouse will help me run the family business.”
    “Family business,” he mumbled, and laughed. He was too weak to say much. It was the end and she whispered to him what she had learned to whisper with great confidence— It’s okay to let go —only