It was so, so cold, and his wife was dying right in their bed. For weeks she’d insisted it was ok, it would go away. He pretended too, as long as he could.

The wind rattled the windows, but she herself kept perfectly still. Any movement meant vertigo. The winter sunlight was pale and frigid, doing nothing to help. He finally grabbed the upstairs phone and called Dr. B while she listened.

The problem was clear the next day, when she vomited on Dr. B while following his flashlight with her eyes. One brain scan and one phone call later and they all knew: tumor.

After hanging up the phone, she and he stared out that bedroom window, clutching each other. They said the Lord’s Prayer together, and the phrase “Thy will be done” bloomed into the most miraculous peace.

The hospital itself was frigid, wind creeping through the ancient windows, not enough blankets to go around and all of them thin. He followed her gurney down to the neurosurgical suite, trying and failing to stay in her line of sight. He scuttled along awkwardly as they rushed through a set of airtight doors. They stopped him there, and he said what he thought might be goodbye, afraid that she might not even have heard. She said she loved him as they rushed her through the next set of doors. He stared at the empty space, trying not to put a label on what just happened.

Turning to leave, he saw he was trapped in a no-man’s-land between two sets of doors: one that would not let him escape, another that would take him where he should never go. Even with fear and sorrow dulling his rational mind, he knew how sadly apt that scene was: he could picture himself from above, lost in limbo. Eventually, another gurney burst in, and he escaped to wander the city while a team of surgeons tried their best.

It was nearly Christmas, and he mingled with the shoppers. Snowflakes and a cold wind that made everyone’s eyes water hid his failure to keep his foolish promise to himself that he would not cry until this was over.

Walking in the cold, he felt like a ghost, floating through thousands of people living their Christmas lives, jostling for bargains while the surgeons drilled a hole through his wife’s skull and went hunting for bad things with microscopes strapped to their faces. He tried his best to be numb. The cold helped, at least on the outside.

The surgery took twelve hours. The neurosurgeon was optimistic that they got it all.

Days passed. She was still able to speak, to see, to hear. She remembered him, and she remembered the Latin names of plants. She walked a little. She froze in that ward, and ever after he was ashamed that he hadn’t raised hell, hadn’t at least brought her warm blankets from home.

The hours they spent in the ward were strange. Her roommate had so many tunnels cut through her skull that she wore a helmet all the time to protect what was left. Other patients in the neuro recovery ward were either deathly still or living out loud in worlds pieced together from what was left of their brains. He felt lucky.

During this time, grandparents and friends rushed to help, coming and going in shifts of love. His kids knew something was very wrong but seemed to believe what he told them, what he himself would come to believe, that it would be all right, that they’d fixed Mommy’s head and she’d be home soon but weak for a while.

Days passed, filled by long drives into the city, long searches for parking in the hospital’s too-small garage, hours spent amidst the survivors of brain surgery, and hours stolen in between to attend to work.

Finally, it was very late on the night before her discharge. He finished the long drive home, pulled into the driveway, sat in the cold dark car.

He finally gave himself permission. It was over. They made it. He could let go and cry. He should cry. They said it was necessary, therapeutic, almost obligatory.

But no tears would come, nor did he feel again that profound sense of peace. Nothing and more nothing. No joy, no relief, no gratitude. He was totally empty.

He knew that was not good. But if someone called him a lucky bastard, how could he argue?

Tom Willemain is a former academic who is swapping working with numbers for playing with words. He holds degrees from Princeton and MIT and has been published internationally in both flash fiction and poetry. A native of western Massachusetts, he lives with his wife and son near the Mohawk River in upstate New York.