Soldiering On

She's a dragon. At 8am the carers arrive and she opens the door smartly as they walk up the path past the water feature and the ranks of blooms on parade. Her make up is immaculate, from the electric blue eye shadow to the coral lipstick, her hair is a Thatcheresque helmet of gold waves. She is every inch the corporate wife, seventy eight now, she could pass for her early sixties and one glare from those gimlet eyes has us wiping our feet and saying good morning while fighting the urge to curtsy.
He is eighty two but, like his lady wife, he looks a good ten years younger, or he would if he wasn't dying. It's been a long pitiless onslaught, a brain disorder that has left him cognitively intact but physically ebbing away year after year. He could walk, albeit slowly and painfully and using a frame, until two years ago. Then he no longer walked. He submitted to the indignity of a hoist, a mo lift, a wheelchair and a life of cricket videos and pureed food. He became physically rigid and could no longer speak except in a whisper, but my God, he was well cared for.
She terrified the staff for years. The routine was as rigid as his poor old limbs. He was showered and dried with a variety of towels for each part of his body. His teeth were brushed, his tongue scraped and white spirit painted on his toes with a soft artist's brush (in all these years we have never dared to ask why) Then back to the bedroom and God help us if a towel was not replaced symmetrically or the floor was not completely dried. His hair had to be blow dried just so, his watch fastened around a wrist that had shrunken until the gold strap flapped like a bangle where it had once fitted snugly. Wet shave and after shave and cashmere sweater and slacks and then into the gracious living room with the views of the garden and the cut glass decanters. She hated each new worker for months and I grew to dread the clipped tones on the telephone as she rang to catalogue their deficiencies. But even in the darkest days of our relationship we forgave it all. We knew that she would go quiet about each new carer within a few weeks and within a few more they would become acceptable to her. More than that, she loved him, oh how she loved him. When she spoke to him the clipped tones would relax, the icy blue eyes would soften and the rigid lines of her face would relax to show a glimpse of the pretty girl she had been and the handsome woman she still was. The illness marched on but she was the stuff of which the Empire was made. She didn't compromise. The house was pristine, mellow wood and Turkish rugs, fresh flowers and oil paintings. The garden was manicured and she looked ready to host a garden party in it at a moments notice and above all, he was cared for with every ounce of her formidable will.
But now he is dying. The creeping process is racing to it's conclusion. In the space of a month he has gone from his armchair to his bed and now his breathing is shallow, his eyes never open and the rigid limbs are still, barely making an impression on the Egyptian cotton sheets and the appliquéd bed cover. The hospital said take him home, his notes say not for resuscitation, they can do nothing for him now. It took us a few days to persuade her that it was too exhausting for him to have a shower. She allowed the bed bath but she stood at the door, only the nervous twisting of her hands betraying emotion as she made sure he still had his hair blow dried, his watch fastened. Her voice trembled slightly when she asked him which after shave he wanted and got no reply, but she recovered and chose for him, telling him brightly which one he was having today.
We would be okay if she had kept it up, but this morning when he didn't respond to our voices, or to hers when she told him their grand daughter had postponed her wedding she couldn't keep it up any more. This morning she cried. And so did we.