"Yes," he said. "You see, I, too, have been seeing a lot of things, now that I've been spending so much time at the hospital." He took a deep breath. "One night I got up and went down the hallway to see this woman who was crying. She was an elderly woman and the doctors didn't know what to do for her. She was dying. I held her hand and stroked her forehead like she was a child. She immediately calmed down and was able to pass over in her sleep so peacefully. "The night nurse was furious, and the next morning she told the doctors what I'd done. They, too, became upset, telling me I didn't have the authority to visit other patients. That poor nurse and the doctors, they just weren't prepared to accept the simple truth that they aren't in control. No one is in control, Mundo. We're all just God's guests for a short time." I don't know why, but I now asked, "Joseph, are you dying?" He looked at me straight in the eyes. "Yes, Mundo," he said, "I'm dying."

He recognized her despite the uproar, through his tears of unrepeatable sorrow at dying without her, and he looked at her for the last and final time with eyes more luminous, more grief-stricken, more grateful than she had ever seen them in half a century of a shared life, and he managed to say to her with his last breath: “Only God knows how much I loved you

"Undoubtedly, on his death bed, at
that moment when, ever since Socrates, it has been proper to pronounce certain elevated words, he told
his wife, as one of my uncles told his, who
had watched beside him for twelve nights, "I do not thank you, Therese; you have only done your
duty.

His wife had held him in her arms as if she could keep death away from him. He had cried out, "My God, I am a dead man!"

He told me a story. A man buried his wife. At the gravesite he stood by the Reb, tears falling down his face. “I loved her,” he whispered. The Reb nodded. “I mean…I really loved her.” The man broke down. “And…I almost told her once.” The Reb looked at me sadly. “Nothing haunts like the things we don’t say.

If you are kissing your child or wife, say that it is a human being whom you are kissing, for when the wife or child dies, you will not be disturbed.

I. But he hears not. Now, my warrior guests, I drink to the onward passage of his soul Death. Had my hand turned coward or played me false, This man that is my hand, and less than I And less than he bloodguilty, this my death Had been my husband's: now he has left it me. [Drinks] How innocent are all but he and I No time is mine to tell you. Truth shall tell. I pardon thee, my husband: pardon me. [Dies]

The man now retrieved a linen cloth and stuffed it deep into Katherine’s mouth. “Death,” he
whispered to her, “should be a quiet thing.

He is the only man, since my dear husband died, to have had the effrontery to kiss me on the lips.”

He hadn't wooed her, but had simply claimed her. A gold mine ready to dig. There should have been a period of quiet dinners together, of flowers rather than diamonds, of kisses given after permission to kiss, of a slow awakening that predisposed her to greater intimacies. But no, not the great Alexander Kinross! He had met her, he had married her the next day, and climbed into her bed after one kiss in the church. There to prove himself an animal in her eyes. One mistake after another, that was the story of his relationship with Elizabeth. And Ruby had always meant more.

She thought that before old age and death there would be a long, long life before her, and that day by day she would have to put up with being close to a man she did not love, who had just now come into the bedroom and was getting into bed, and would have to stifle in her heart her hopeless love for the other young, fascinating, and, as she thought, exceptional man. She looked at her husband and tried to say good-night to him, but suddenly burst out crying instead. She was vexed with herself. And all at once he put his arm round her waist, while she, without knowing what she was doing, laid her hands on his shoulders and for a minute gazed with ecstasy, almost intoxication, at his clever, ironical face, his brow, his eyes, his handsome beard.

When Augustus Townsend died in Georgia near the Florida line, he rose up above the barn where he had died, up above the trees and the crumbling smokehouse and the little family house nearby, and he walked away quick-like, toward Virginia. He discovered that when people were above it all they walked faster, as much as a hundred times faster than when they were confined to the earth. And so he reached Virginia in little or no time. He came to the house he had built for his family, for Mildred his wife and Henry his son, and he opened and went through the door. He thought she might be at the kitchen table, unable to sleep and drinking something to ease her mind. But he did not find his wife there. Augustus went upstairs and found Mildred sleeping in their bed. He looked at her for a long time, certainly as long as it would have taken him, walking up above it all, to walk to Canada and beyond. Then he went to the bed, leaned over and kissed her left breast.
The kiss went through the breast, through skin and bone, and came to the cage that protected the heart. Now the kiss, like so many kisses, had all manner ofkeys, but it, like so many kisses, was forgetful, and it could not find the right key to the cage. So in the end, frustrated, desperate, the kiss squeezed through the bars and kissed Mildred’s heart. She woke immediately and she knew her husband was gone forever. All breath went and she was seized with such a pain that she had to come to her feet. But the room and the house were not big enough to contain her pain and she stumbled out ofthe room, out and down the stairs, out through the door that Augustus, as usual, had left open. The dog watched her from the hearth. Only in the yard could she begin to breathe again. And breath brought tears. She fell to her knees, out in the open yard, in her nightclothes, something Augustus would not have approved of. Augustus died on Wednesday.

And sweeter woman ne'er drew breath
Than my sonne's wife, Elizabeth.

One sweet whisper from her came ;
And he drank to catch her breath, —
Wine and sigh alike are death !