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The air felt warm and muggy. Hannah was dragging as she came to the place where the road began to climb. She would turn around at the top of the hill, she thought, rather than walking all the way to the bridge. Then the ghost said: Go to the bridge.

So she kept walking. Past the blackberries, over the hill, and on to the wooden bridge, one foot after another, and further, to the fork in the road, before heading back.

Don’t complain, said the ghost. You’ve got a body.

She did indeed still have a body: legs to climb the hill, eyes to see the pond. Feet to carry her home.

You weren’t so eager to care for your body when you had one, she thought. With no need to defend himself, he gestured towards the jumbled heap of shame and regret he had shouldered as a human. A ghostly shrug.

Walking had been a shared pleasure.  Summer nights, when they both finished work before sunset, they would meet at the creek, pushing open the heavy gate and heading into the hills. Quail rustled in the blackberry brambles along the creek. Cows lifted their heads from grazing. They didn’t talk much, just walked, side by side, step by step, balancing on flat rocks where the creek ran over the road. One day she noticed he was limping. “Did you hurt your foot?”  she asked.

“No,” he said. “My foot feels fine.”

She shrugged. They walked on.

They cherished living in the foothills. Morning sunlight streamed through the kitchen window. Hummingbirds hovered at the feeder. A fox stole figs from beneath the fig tree. Jake commuted to the city. After a long day at work, he would drive home, then mow the weeds, fix the well pump, chop wood for the fire. He had taken such pride in his strength. When he began to come home tired he felt angry, impatient with his body, ashamed of his tiredness. He didn’t tell her until later how it had become hard getting out of the car. She hadn’t noticed that he seemed shaky standing up from a chair. One day, as they walked through the hills, he tripped and fell. Strange for him to fall. At dinner he asked impatiently, “Why do my fingers keep trembling?” But it seemed a small thing, the trembling of a few fingers.

That March the rains began, merging with melting snow in the mountains to swell the creeks. Hannah drove home along Cedar Creek, transformed into a swirling, mud-brown river. Jake’s truck stood in the driveway, but the house was dark. He hadn’t lit a fire, and the house felt damp and chill. She found him seated on the sofa with his head in his hands. He’d seen the doctor, who told him that he had Parkinson’s disease.  She sat beside him, held him close.

“Will you stay with me?” he asked.

How could he even doubt? But they knew little about Parkinson’s. The doctor had prescribed medication to ward off symptoms for a while. Maybe a long while, the doctor said.

Now, lying awake in the dark, waiting for sleep to numb her to oblivion, she remembers how it felt curling around him. His animal heat. The soft animal fur that coated his body. He’d let his hair grow, and she would half bury her nose in his ponytail. A distant memory, nights when he still slept peacefully. Later his sleep became uneasy, his tame daylight self vanishing into dream. Early in his illness he would act out dreams, his jerky movement waking her, his arms flailing, legs running nowhere. He grunted uneasily in anger or alarm. One night she woke to find him holding his head off the pillow and growling, a whirring sound like stuck machinery. She shook him awake. “What are you doing?” she asked.

“Riding my motorcycle.” He had planned to ride a Harley up the winding California coast, to explore the mountainous lands of Idaho and Montana after he retired.

After a few years he could no longer commute to work. His rigid muscles would not obey him; he struggled to get out of a chair, teetering, legs wobbly and unstable. His body began to shrink. When he could no longer do the chores to maintain their world, he fell into a dark sinkhole haunted by uncompleted tasks. Time hung heavy. The seasons changed, there was grass to be mowed, a fence to be mended. He felt flawed, blamed himself, could not bear to know that others continued doing tasks he no longer could.

For her, tasks didn’t matter. She missed the warmth of his eyes. She wanted him to smile when she brushed out his ponytail, pulled the covers around his shoulders at night. But he could not make peace with needing help. “I’m a burden,” he kept muttering, brushing her love aside. He stared ahead blankly, his features frozen into a mask, no longer expressing joy, or even anger. She knew the Parkinson’s mask was a symptom of the disease, but she was losing him.

The medication stopped working well. Often he had trouble speaking, swallowing. He could not turn over in bed. “Go, go to work. I’ll be fine,” he would say. One day she came home from work to find him wedged between the toilet and the sink, drenched in sweat from his efforts to get up. How could she leave him alone?  She was beginning to need help caring for him, but he wanted no one there but her.  The future terrified them both.

They went to his favorite Italian restaurant for dinner. He was sullen, envying couples who made easy conversation as they sipped their wine, embarrassed by his own rigid movements, his garbled speech, haunted by all that would not be. They sat across from one another, the air leaden between them. Eating had become a chore, aiming for the mouth, chewing, hoping the choking reflex would not be triggered, glancing up to see if she noticed he was drooling, hastily moving his haunted eyes away. He had lost his sense of smell. Food no longer interested him. Yet there remained the chore of making his way out, awkwardly maneuvering between tables of diners who laughed together while they enjoyed their pasta. Mumbling his apologies too low for them to hear.

He began courting death. He had witnessed his mother’s tortuous withdrawal as she succumbed to Alzheimer’s. He used to visit her in the nursing home, where she muttered senselessly, no longer recognizing him. Packing up her apartment, he’d found a book proposing the choice of a pain-free end to suffering, with instructions for a fast and easy death. So his mother had once considered ending her own life. She’d considered it, but had not acted in time, while she could still make a rational choice.

“I won’t wait till it’s too late,” said Jake. A whisper.

Jake’s body had become so frail. When he spoke of death, Hannah listened. Whatever he chose, she would accept. In his place, she thought, she would make the same choice. She tried often to coax him out on the deck, to look at the way the breeze ruffled the oak leaves, to look again into the sky. But he had lost the will to look. What she could not say: they were both sinking. Each night she arranged the heating pad beneath his cold feet, placed his water glass where he could reach it, switched on the nightlight. She sat by his side, watching his face contort as he said goodnight, pushing her own feelings aside, touching them only in the darkness while he slept. Even then her grief seemed muted. She waited in a kind of limbo. As if she had ceased breathing.

He set a date to end his life. He was ready to be done with it. Cancelled that date, set another one. Hannah said, “I want a friend with me.” She phoned Sue, who promised to come.

Now she lies awake, hearing a far-off train whistle. Bands of silver moonlight shine through the blinds. The blanket is too warm. The sheets are too cold. Remembering the husky shape of his body, before illness. The blessing of his fur. She cannot imagine any body but Jake’s beside her. From now into the future she will sleep each night alone, wake alone to begin another day. Another morning to be followed by another evening to be followed by another morning. The summer without him to be followed by the fall without him, followed by the icy winter, followed by the spring and then summer again.

The night lasts longer than the day. Clock numbers glow red in the darkness. One o’clock, then two, then four-thirty. And then she senses his presence. The ghost, not appearing so much as becoming. The blessing of the ghost. She realizes she can curl around his presence. A cocoon of memory. Only that. And she drifts into sleep.

She dreams of a blue land, sparkling like Christmas. The ghost is transparent, easier in ghostliness than he was in life. It was harder to be a man. Being a ghost becomes him.

You walked me to the threshold, says the ghost.

It was true. Hannah had held Jake. Her hand upon his heart. A candle burning. A summer night. Rain pounding on the roof. Death slipping in like smoke. Filling the space.

Sue had driven out from the city. Hannah brewed a strong tea of chamomile and mint. Set honey on the table, and a saucer where they could rest their spoons. There was the sound of the rain, the hot tea, and the smoky presence of death. She listened as Sue talked about life in the city, needing to hear the sound of the familiar, the ordinary, the sound of the spoken word. Then silence again. Everything changing around them. Like wind spiraling through the house.

After their tea, they walked a little in the drizzling rain. Finally Hannah was ready to go back and phone the doctor. “I thought he was taking a nap,” she told the doctor.  “I can’t wake him.” The doctor rushed over. He had called paramedics, and because the death was unexpected, a policewoman also arrived to check medication bottles, alert for signs of “foul play.”  Suddenly the house was filled with people.  A tall paramedic in uniform kept asking questions, while his quieter assistant leaned against the wall looking apologetic. The doctor talked with the medical examiner on his cell phone.  After a time Hannah could hear them chatting, catching up on news. She allowed Sue to lead her back into the bedroom. Finally overcome, she lost track of who was there, who was not, let go into weeping, longing for them all to be gone, to be alone with Jake’s stillness.

Sue hovered close. Hannah returned to the living room and begged the paramedics to leave Jake’s body in the house. His spirit might need time to leave his body. The head paramedic was reluctant. There were phone calls, arrangements, a man at a funeral home promised to send someone to collect the body the next day. Finally the doctor and the paramedics left, and the rain stopped. Hannah urged Sue to leave too, promising to call if she wanted her back. She ached to be alone in the house with Jake.

In the bedroom, Jake’s body lay upon the bed. One eye remained slightly open. She lay beside him, gently stroked his pale cheek. His skin felt cool. She could stroke his cheek, and he did not worry about giving back. Only in death was he able to let go of obligation, relieved to let go of form. Cloaks falling to the ground. He doesn’t miss them now.

Hannah sleeps on the right side of the bed. The left side had been his. Waking on the right side of the bed, seeking the thin strips of light filtering through the blinds.

In the morning:  coffee, the cat asking to be let out, sunlight.  To become again, to find herself embodied. It’s hard to get out of bed without sunlight, to start the day without the comfort of his warmth. What to eat.  How to begin.

Another morning.  Another day, so quickly; wasn’t it just another day yesterday? The mysterious ways of time. It didn’t use to move so fast. Bare feet on the rug. Open the blinds, notice the clouds, reach for the sandals, go up the driveway to get the newspaper. She drinks coffee alone, skimming the headlines. A morning to be followed by an afternoon to be followed by an evening to be followed by a night. The blinds pulled shut. The cat fed. Climbing into the right side of the bed. Switching off the light.

And sometimes, his presence. His care for her.  Appearing in the night, and by morning gone. She never asks where he goes, or how it feels to be dead. He asks no questions either. Words are not called for.

Yet she feels him there:  You walked me to the threshold.

Love speaks many languages.  Stars streak across the heavens. Mysteries lie hidden in caves. To have loved and been loved, and to carry that into the darkness and into the light. Loved by a man with a body, and loved by a presence when the body has dropped away.  So many nights. So many grains of sand. So many paths of blessing.

Modern Women: 21st Century Dance
A coloring book and a calendar

by Julie Lemberger, edited by Elizabeth Zimmer

Modern Women: 21st Century Dance coloring book and 2026 calendar are both great gifts for women, girls, dance lovers, and those who love them. Veteran New York City dance photographer Julie Lemberger created this unique coloring book based on her photography, to celebrate innovative, entrepreneurial, and steadfast women dance artists. Have fun and relax coloring images of women who dance. An admirer remarked: “A lovely and poignant book. Made with love and reverence.” The products feature dance artists Wendy Whelan, Yoshiko Chuma, Michelle Dorrance, Hope Boykin, Eiko Otake, Netta Yarushalmy, Urban Bush Women, and many more. The coloring book offers 90 pages of personalities to get to know, biographies, and even a glossary of dance terms for the 21st century. The calendar, also a coloring book, offers 12 distinct women to brighten each month of 2026. For more about the artist: julielemberger.com. Available at etsy.com/shop/dancecoloringbook.

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