Montey died. It was about 10:30pm on February 7, 2023. This was also the day that would have been my mom’s 70th birthday. One can only hope that, if there is an existence after this one, that she greeted him with a shot of whiskey and a joint at the ready. After all, if there manages to be an existence in the beyond, it would have to allow for indulgences without the consequences as felt on earth, right?
Technically, the official documents will list his death as 12:15am on February 8. Being under hospice care, after he died, I talked to him for a while… then gave him his last bath (oh holy fuck, I don’t recommend this… I might have worked as a CNA back in the early 90s and given countless baths to dead people… but those people weren’t my husband… this was a level of unnecessary trauma to which I did NOT need to subject myself.) By the time I then called, and the nurse came out, it was after midnight when she listened for a pulse, etc…
My thought in giving him his last bath, as I told him while I was doing it, was that, in olden times a woman’s last act for her husband, was to bathe him and sew him into his burial shroud. Well, I joked to him, I wasn’t giving up a blanket I’d sewn but I could do that bath, our last moments of togetherness, the last act of my vows… ’til death do us part. It’s a painful memory but so very much a final one as well.
We were together from March of 1992, married in December of 1994, and parted by death in February of 2023. So many years. So many memories.
fuck.
(note, this entry is written seven weeks after he died though I’m going to date it at his official time of death – I can’t barely write it now…)