A doorway

The elevator creaked before going up. A soft whirling noise made me look up, searching for the source of such troubling noise. I have never liked elevators. I can not say I am claustrophobic but once I got stuck in one of these four-walled metal cases and I almost loose my head. Fortunately for me it only lasted a few minutes… but they seemed to me like centuries.

Up we went to the third floor, where Gina lied since two days now, and where Ryan, her husband, and Marisa, her younger daughter, waited… they waited like we waited, uncertain, with the doubt that only God could know the precise moment when she would be finally in peace…

The door of the elevator slid open and I couldn’t avoid the pungent smell that suddenly invaded my nostrils. I stepped backward. I made no other sign however. I didn’t want to disturb the impenetrable soul of my beloved partner, who had already enough with the anguish of loosing his mother. He hadn’t noticed my sudden shiver and he moved out, taking my hand as to get out of the elevator. I looked at my wristwatch instinctively. It was five minutes after eleven and the sun had gone down at four thirty that afternoon.

It was shadowy down the corridor… six rooms to our right lied Gina. A disturbing silence invaded the place, besides solitude and hopelessness… how didn’t I realize this before. I had scented death on my way out of the metal case. Still, I had my doubts, while those who lay resting inside of the rooms all along the floor, made strange noises, although quite smooth and peaceful.

I remember smiling while going up. Jerry had exposed some foolish notions and I had giggled nervously, being sure that the circumstances weren’t of laughing at all… but they all had kept their humour, even when they knew that the end was near.

We arrived that morning as soon as they had called. Jerry asked if I was going with him there and I felt disappointed. It was my duty as a wife to partake all (I mean all) the moments of my husband’s life, even the most terrible moments. They were all anxious and filled with sympathetic expectations… I had already gone twice through this situation and I felt no good at all. I was thoughtful, meditative, trying to understand the meaning of every sign, of every breath that Gina inhaled and exhaled. Was it all, was she still there and was she listening to the others while they were there, knowing simply that it was but the end?

Jerry used to laugh at me when I said that I had these sensations that distressed me sometimes, things that only those who were able to see far beyond the wall of sleep could understand. Whether I was a doorway to those who enter or left this world, I wasn’t certain. No one ever told me. But such experiences were unknown to me and still, I kept having them.

Being on Gina’s room while she was unconscious, hardly able to breath, while her family watched her every breath, her every bit of life vanish, made me wonder. My mother, after being about a year fighting against an indomitable cancer, had wakened up one morning in the same condition. I was only eighteen then and six hours after waiting, hoping, thinking and praying, she left us, regardless our suffering, my sobs… my young years. And while I watched Gina lying there, unconscious, wheezing, with all those tubes that connected her to the world of the living, I knew that she was already gone… she had left our world the second she had pressed on Marisa’s hand and Marisa had told Ryan – her father – I think she thinks that it is your hand that is holding hers.

The sun sent soft rays to bright Gina’s already pale figure…

… to lighten her way up to heaven…

We had left then, back home.

All the while I thought, she will go when she will be ready… and inside of my subconscious I was certain the she was already gone…

Hours later we were going up the elevator, when I scented the pungent odour and I was not sure what it was… I recognised it later, when I walked in the room and I saw Ryan standing on one side of the bed and Marisa, on the other, facing the doorway. Gina lied face up, very straight, her eyes and cheeks sunken and her mouth wide opened… I looked at Marisa and I could only read her lips… it is over, she said in a whisper.

I gasped. I feared… I feared for my husband, I feared for Marisa, but I mostly feared for Ryan. Gina was the only thing that had kept him alive, the only hope, the only beauty that enlightened the ugliness and sadness of what their life had been. Now that she was gone there was nothing left for him. Their children, even their grandchildren were all grown-ups and healthy and they even had children… but I feared and I mourned for Ryan, because I knew that when the moment would come, he would let his life go with hers.

I leaned against the frame of the door, and it was then that I felt the warmth and the pressing of a hand over my left shoulder. It insisted on making its presence remarkable and I knew, whoever it was – although I thought it could be Gina’s hand – it was encouraging me to encourage those that she had left behind because she had nothing left to deal with in the world of the living. I raised my left hand and placed it over the one that was still over my shoulder… then it left and Gina’s body began to get colder and colder, faster and faster.

I am certain that no one in that room believe in what I believe and if ever Gina wants to send a message to her beloved ones, she will use me to do so… It started to rain one hour after Gina’s passing. They say that angels cry when heroes die… I still believe even when Jerry laughed at me when I told him so.