At least I’m not sleeping with the hospice music therapist.
Cedar. He’s twenty years old, twenty-five tops, and he has a voice like an angel who maybe swallowed a bag of gravel. His guitar case is covered in stickers: a smiley face, a skull, Drake, Joni Mitchell. “When you’re famous, I’m going to say I knew you when!” I said once, and it was a mistake. He shook his head, his baby forehead suddenly crosshatched with distress. I’d gotten him so wrong. “No, no,” he said. “This is it. I’m already doing the thing I want to do.”
“Of course!” I said quickly. “It’s such a perfect job for you.” And he said, “Yeah, though sometimes I dream that somebody requests something, and I’m like, ‘Hang on a sec, I don’t know that one. Let me just look it up on my phone.’ But while I’m googling ‘Luck Be a Lady’ or whatever, they die. And that’s the last thing anyone ever said to them. ‘Hang on a sec.’”
“Shit, Cedar,” I said, and he said, “Right?”
Now he’s sitting on the end of the bed, strumming the beginning of something. The Beatles, “Across the Universe.” Edi’s eyes are closed, but she smiles. She’s awake in there somewhere. “Cedar,” she says, and he says, “Hey, Edi,” lays a palm on her shin, then returns to his song, strumming some and singing, humming the parts he can’t remember. My heart fills with, and releases, grief in time to my breathing.
We’ve been—Edi’s been—at the Graceful Shepherd Hospice for three weeks now. Three weeks is a long time at hospice, but also, because of what hospice means, it kind of flies by. But it flies by crawlingly, like a funhouse time warp. Like life with a newborn: It’s breakfast, all milk and sunshine, and then it’s feeding and changing that recur forever, on a loop, like some weird soiled nighties circle of hell. And then somehow it’s the next day again, and you’re like, “Who’s hungry for their breakfast?” Only nobody is hungry for their breakfast. Except Edi. “Oooh. Make me French toast?” she said this morning to Olga, the Ukrainian nurse we love, who responded, “Af khorse.”
The hospice had estimated, when we checked her in, that Edi would be their guest for just a week or two. “We don’t think of this as a place where people come to die,” the gravely cheerful intake counselor had said to us. “We think of it as a place where people come to live!” “To live dyingly,” Edi had whispered to me, and I’d laughed. We all refer to the hospice as Shapely—as in, “I’ll meet you over at Shapely”—because Edi, only half-awake when we were first talking about it, thought it was called the Shapely Shepherd. “Like a milkmaid in one of those lace-up outfits?” she’d said, and I’d said, “Wait. What?” And then, when I pictured what she was picturing, “Yes. Exactly like that.”
Hospice is a complicated place to pass the time because you are kind of officially dying. “Am I, though?” Edi says sometimes, when dying comes up, as it is wont to come up in hospice, and I pull my eyebrows up and shrug, like Who knows? “If anything happens to me . . .” she likes to start some sentences—about Dash or Jude or her journals or her jewelry. And I say, “What on earth would happen to you?” and she laughs and says, “I know, right? But just on the off chance.”
Sometimes the hospice physician comes through—the enormous, handsome man we call Dr. Soprano because he looks like James Gandolfini—and she says, “When do you think I can get out of here?” You can tell that he can’t tell if she’s kidding or not, probably because she’s not really kidding. “Good question,” he says, poker-faced, rummaging through her box of edibles and breaking off a tiny nibble of the chocolate kind he likes. “Do you mind?” he says, after the fact, and then, “If anyone’s getting out of here, Edi, it is definitely you.”
Which, to be honest, is not saying much. The average age of the other patients is a hundred and fifty. They’re so old, some of these folks, their bodies so worn down and used up, that sometimes when you peek into their rooms to say hi you can’t even tell if they’re there in their beds or not. They’re nearly completely flat, like paper dolls, with just a tiny fluff of cotton glued at the top for hair. You half expect to see a ghost climb up out of their body, like in a cartoon. One of them likes me to come in and hold her hand. She always offers me a lemon drop from her special tin and says, “Did you come straight off the school bus?” And I say, “I did, Ruth! I came right to you.” Forty-five-year-old me, fresh off the school bus with my under-eye bags and plantar fasciitis and boobs hanging down my torso like beige knee socks with no legs in them. There’s nothing like hospice to remind you that decrepitude is totally relative.
“I believe I may be mildly demented,” Ruth whispered once, apologetically, and I was like, “Oh, please. Same.”
Ruth has been here for over a year, which I know is a total inspiration to Edi, although she has never mentioned it. Ruth is also the person who watches Fiddler on the Roof every afternoon and also some nights. The volume is turned way up and, for hours every day, it’s the soundtrack of everybody’s dying. You’re helping someone into compression stockings or fresh briefs during “Matchmaker.” Someone is weeping in your arms while Tevye yiddle-diddles “If I Were a Rich Man.” It’s “Sunrise, Sunset,” only you’re cry-laughing because there’s a turd on the floor and you don’t know if it’s human or from one of the resident dogs.
Now we hear the overture starting up, Ruth clapping in delight, whooping from her room, and Cedar says, “That’s my cue,” and zips his guitar into its case. He kisses Edi’s cheek, kisses mine, and closes the door gently on his way out.
“Oh my god, Ash,” Edi says. Her eyes are still closed. “You’re sleeping with Cedar.”
“Edi! Jesus. I’m not a grave robber.”
She laughs and says, “I think you mean cradle robber.”
“Ugh,” I say, and palm my forehead. “Yes, sorry.” There are many hidden awkwardnesses in hospice, like when you say things like “This gelato is so good I’m dying,” or “Oof, I ate too much gelato, kill me,” and then remember that there’s an actually dying person also eating the gelato, or a person who might genuinely wish you would kill them. “He’s so cute, though,” I add. “Timothée Chalamet would play him in the movie.” She smiles, wags a finger at me in warning.
“Don’t,” she says, and I mean it when I say, “I would seriously never.”
“Hey,” she says, her eyes still closed. “Honey’s coming over in a little. I hope that’s cool with you. He’s bringing me some stuff.” Honey is my ex-husband. Or he would be, if we weren’t too cheap and lazy to get an actual divorce. The stuff he brings Edi is from the dispensary in town, which he owns. Or, I guess, which we own, technically.
“Of course,” I say. “He’s practically living at the house again. I think he’s coming by later, to see Jonah.”
“Wait,” she says, “Jonah’s still here?”
“Here here? ...
We hope you are enjoying the book so far. To continue reading...
Copyright © 2025 All Rights Reserved
Please log in to recommend or discuss...
