Looking back, I knew I wanted my wife of 26 years to die after her epithelial ovarian cancer diagnosis–Stage 4; five-year survival rate.

Five years was too long.

The Wednesday she got diagnosed my heart lodged in my boney knees and boney elbows. Not in the way where your heart races and then completes the race and slows to normal. No. This time my heart remained trapped in the infinitely foreboding type of way.

Just the day before, we had picked strawberries and raspberries from rolling lush hills, discussing whether to make strawberry or raspberry macarons. The rolling lush hills were promised years ahead of us. Not anymore. Now the bleak midwinter. Thinking of how gleeful we were that day is irreconcilable now. Ludicrous. I cringe and loathe my happiness that day. How stupid our angelic ignorance.

The first screaming match between us scorched my throat. Volcanic finger blaming her for turning a blind eye to constant urination, her stomach too bloated, and struggling to eat for a whole year. The car shuddered as we drove home. The diagnosis given with a pitiful, round voice. Sitting in the chemically bleached room I wanted the doctor to tell her, “I TOLD YOU SO!” Instead it was me who shrieked it the whole 40-minute drive home.

I wasn’t a downer but I had imagined what it’d be like to be diagnosed with cancer, if she were diagnosed with cancer. Who hasn’t at 4:00 a.m.? I imagined I’d personify Make-A-Wish, quit my job with no notice, pull all our collective savings, and move to Portofino, a fishing village on the Italian Riviera coastline. We’d toast in the sun when we weren’t making love in our bright yellow apartment; worshiping, savoring, cherishing her cotton candy lips and pillowy earlobes.

Except. It wasn’t like that.

The day of her diagnosis we didn’t speak for the rest of the night. We shared half-defrosted cod and jasmine rice, a dish I can’t eat to this day. A dish I could barely swallow from the massive lump in my throat. A dish I disdainfully swallowed with tap water thinking about the actual lump seizing her ovaries – and her left lung, her spinal cord. What I recall most about that dinner is her unshed tears brimming on her bottom lashes, how even after dinner I feigned an excuse to turn the light off. I wondered if she wanted to cry because she signed her death certificate or because I screamed, “I told you so.” Unshed, her tears never cleared, glazed like a fog of demise.

We’d grown out of cuddling—married 26 years and all–and that night in bed all I wanted was her to shun me, turn her solid wall of a back so I could seethe and hate her in peace. With the duvet up to her neck she turned her pure, tender face towards me. Unviolated. Trusting. And shut her eyes.

“Good night. I love you,” she said with tranquility. Tranquility that sparked wild fury roaring down my throat.

How was there time to sleep when one was dying?

I’m sorry pressed every corner of my mind. Caught, like the cod in my throat, like the heart pounding nauseatingly in my knees and elbows. I couldn’t drag I’m sorry from my mind to my tongue because I was a furious coward.

Instead in a hoarse whisper: “Are you going to die?”

Her face remained impassive, perhaps she had slept? Until she said: “We’re all dying, aren’t we?”

Though I’d spent an odd number of hours thinking about cancer, I wasn’t a downer. Though I imagined her funeral, I never thought she would die. Because I didn’t fear her dying. It was incomprehensible to me, as silly as fearing clowns. But in those creeping, early morning hours I surreptitiously kept my palm on her stomach, holding my breath, counting her faint dips in breathing. One… two… three. I reminisced about her pleasant snores, but she remained silent and rigid. At one point my hand felt glove-thick numb, and I inched my hand to her nose. Barely breathing.

Any moment she could die now.

As the night labored on, my anger ceased, only to flare by her awakening at 7:00.

“Good morning,” she yawned.

Was it a good morning? The morning gray seeped through the blinds. A boulder of rage and dread settled on my ribcage, crushing me. If I had woken up amnesic (or hadn’t woken up at all), it could have been a good morning. She didn’t look weaker or damaged, nothing had physically changed, but I knew the internal warzone. I could never unknow. I had tumbled off my plane into a nightmarish reality.

“Is it?”

She nuzzled closer: “It must be since I woke up to you.” I writhed away from her.

Writing this, I don’t remember the shallow heart-to-heart we had that morning. I wish I did.

Despite her pleading eyes and steadfast grip on my car keys, I left for work unnaturally early that Thursday, and didn’t return until near 9:00 (three hours later than I should have come back). She informed me she took a leave of absence from work, hinting I should do the same. I didn’t know what she’d do at home. I couldn’t bear to ask. The next day I went back to work.

The ground was crumbling between us.

I should’ve savored her, should’ve reminded her how much I adored her. But those days with her were plagued with loss. She stood by me yet I was already mourning her. Hanging out like we used to would be deluding myself.

Between commercial breaks one day she plopped down by me on the couch.

“That!” She unmuted the TV and a generic voice introduced the all new 2024 electric SUV. “I’ll name the car Sandy if you get me the cream color.”

I glared at her like a lunatic. Was this an abysmal joke? Why was she lingering in this delusion, hovering in hell? Would she even be alive next year, I wanted to scream at her. So I did.

I remember only one thing I screamed at her: “How dare you die on me?” The rest blotted with bitter tears.

I was uneasy, dark, seething. I loathed her. But most of all I loathed myself. Loathed myself for not being a man, not stepping up to the occasion. I loathed my constant dismissal of her, but I couldn’t rid myself of this strangulating rage. Those 4:00 a.m. nights thinking of cancer, I never assumed it would create a chasm between us. This was the time to spend together. Why was I running away in the face of the hourglass?

A week had limped forward and she had decided – individually – to get treatment. We never even picked outfits without consulting each other, yet she had made the 40 minute trip to the isolating hospital alone. Though, how could I have expected a discussion when her winces and complaints of pain were met with interminable screaming?

Circumstances weren’t so dismal and icy after a month of chemo, between us, I mean. I knew chemo wouldn’t work. We replaced our pillow talk with a closed-eyes, clasped-palms prayer; we had never set foot in any church.

Prayers built a rickety bridge over the chasm. I stopped coming home late, until eventually I took my own leave. We fried bacon and created egg recipes in the mornings and downed three cups of coffee during the evenings to steal more time together. All the while my heart never left my knees and elbows; anger never abandoned my ribcage. Every conversation was eternally overpowered by dread.

Two months passed with menacing overtones.

Ever since her diagnosis, kissing her in bed had soured. When I looked into her black eyes all I saw was a bottomless whirlpool. I highlighted the “symptoms” section of the chemo pamphlet the doctor placed in my hands, but I don’t know when exactly she had fragmented into something heartrending and ugly. Kissing her papery lips stirred violent savagery; I revulsed when she upended her lunch in the toilet. She aged severely, her face grave.

Five months into foreboding chemo and we were tucked in bed as we had been, hands in prayer.

She leaned in and “licked” my lips. (“Licked” because she might as well have been sanding them down).

Being married 26 years I knew she wanted sex. It’s not that I couldn’t get there, it’s that sex felt unbearably lonely after her diagnosis, hundreds of miles away.

Instead, I pulled back demurely, “What is it you pray for?”

I had nowhere to look as I waited for her to speak. Her papery transparent hands or her jowls?

Her voice was faraway, a distant princess, when she answered, “A speedy recovery.”

I blinked at her face.

After my first blundering question we hadn’t brought up dying, no funeral arrangements, no last wishes. Her parents were divorced, one buried in Ohio and another in Kentucky, and we (not buried yet) in Maryland. Where would she prefer her final resting place to be? Or would she rather be scattered dust in Portofino?

She knew she would die, didn’t she?

Once she didn’t elaborate, I nodded and forced myself to brush the fading skin under her hopeful eyes.

That night I prayed for her to die. And every night during the next five months I prayed she would die.

Not so she could finally be at peace, not because she was sagging under the weight of chemotherapy, experimental (failed) surgery, not because death accumulated. But because I didn’t want to face the fact that she was dying. I didn’t want to come to terms with her end. Yet I needed her to die so it would be over with.

Ten months after her diagnosis I had outwardly become simple and passive and endlessly dejected; I had become the man I wanted. She was an heiress, every single need cared for, whether it was BDSM at 1:00 a.m. or tattoo booklets.

The sickly woman couldn’t compare to the fierce lady I grew in love with, the fierce lady she replaced. The wife who straddled motorcycles like a cowboy, who loved craps a little too much, who collected sea glass rather than seashells.

My existence was cheerless and dismal.

I seethed that she lost her stomach for sushi and had no energy for karaoke. Ten months ago my throat would have bled screaming at her. Though I was still furious, I became resigned. Temper quick, I adopted a mantra so I wouldn’t bellow at her: die, please just die.

The existence of God teetered on whether He’d take her away. I despised her old lady smile and cane. I refused to remember her this way.

I read that being in the between is worse than being on the extreme side of good or bad. Ten months ago I would have agreed. Yes, it’s worse knowing something’s wrong but not knowing what. But now it’s worse waiting for her to die. All I prayed for was her life to be over. So I wouldn’t have to endure. Every single morning if she didn’t perk up to the light tap of my finger my heart would stop beating. Every single time she complained of a headache my heart pummeled my knees and my elbows. Every single grimace and every single weak step she took backward I waited in perpetual, strangulating fear.

Looking back as I write this, I hardly recall the 20 trips we took to the beach, the flight we finally took to Portofino is lost in childlike amnesia. I couldn’t store the way her eyes lit behind the SUV’s wheel; all professions of love were not in long-term memory, too focused on acting in the manner she deserved, reigning in my fury.

I hardly ever browse the scrapbook we structured together, tucked in the couch’s storage unit. I can’t browse any of those pictures without remembering how breathless I was, how wild with fear I spent every passing second, how plagued, how dreadful I was. Still, there is nothing more I loathe than my own behavior. How I wish there was a trace of a smile in any picture. How I wish I hadn’t acted like an incomprehensible stranger to the woman I would die for.

In the end, the three years she did live felt like five.

That Wednesday, I had been calling from the kitchen making raspberry macarons when she didn’t answer. On the living room couch her head was tilted back, mouth open in a cheering smile. I knew but needed to check—my finger hovered over her nostril.

I loathe most of all my joyful cry.

Finally, finally dead.

Myra Seles is an emerging writer from Northern New Jersey. She recently graduated Rutgers University with a major in psychology and minor in creative writing. She likes writing character driven stories with raw emotions. Her work won the 2021 Edna Herzberg Prize in Fiction. This is her first publication. Instagram: @myraseles.