Highland Cemetery on Ash Street is a vast park, with a graveled road circling it. It is the oldest cemetery in Junction City, and many of the headstones have long since been eroded by time and weather. Because of the numbing cold, the graveside ceremony was kept brief.
“I am the resurrection and the life; he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live; and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die. I am he that liveth and was dead; and, behold, I am alive forever more.”
Finally, mercifully, it was over. Mary and the children stood in the howling wind watching the casket being lowered into the frozen, uncaring earth.
Good-bye, my darling.
Death is supposed to be an ending, but for Mary Ashley it was the beginning of an unbearable hell. She and Edward had talked about death, and Mary thought she had come to terms with it, but now death had suddenly assumed a reality that was immediate and terrifying. It was no longer a vague event that would happen on some far, distant day. There was no way to cope with it. Everything within Mary screamed to deny what had happened to Edward. When he died, everything wonderful died with him. The reality kept hitting her in fresh waves of shock. She wanted to be alone. She cowered deep within herself, feeling like a small, terrified child abandoned by an adult. She found herself raging against God. Why didn’t you take me first? she demanded. She was furious with Edward for deserting her, furious with the children, furious with herself.
I’m a thirty-five-year-old woman with two children, and I don’t know who I am. When I was Mrs. Edward Ashley, I had an identity, I belonged to someone who belonged to me.
Time was spinning by, mocking her emptiness. Her life was like a runaway train over which she had no control.
Florence and Douglas and other friends stayed with her, trying to make things easier, but Mary wished they would go away and leave her alone. Florence came in one afternoon and found Mary in front of the television set watching a Kansas State football game.
“She didn’t even know I was there,” Florence told her husband that evening. “She was concentrating so desperately on that game.” She shivered. “It was spooky.”
“Why?”
“Mary hates football. It was Edward who watched every game.”
It took Mary’s last ounce of willpower to handle the detritus left by Edward’s death. There was the will, and insurance, and bank accounts and taxes and bills due and Edward’s medical corporation and loans and assets and deficits, and she wanted to scream at the lawyers and bankers and accountants to leave her in peace.
I don’t want to cope, she wept. Edward was gone, and all anyone wanted to talk about was money.
Finally, she was forced to discuss it.
Frank Dunphy, Edward’s accountant, said, “I’m afraid the bills and death taxes are going to use up a lot of the life-insurance money, Mrs. Ashley. Your husband was pretty lax about his patients paying him. He’s owed a lot of money. I’ll arrange for a collection agency to go after the people who owe—”
“No,” Mary said fiercely. “Edward wouldn’t want that.”
Dunphy was at a loss. “Well, then, I guess the bottom line is that your assets are thirty thousand dollars in cash and this house, which has a mortgage on it. If you sold the house—”
“Edward wouldn’t want me to sell it.”
She sat there, stiff and rigid, holding in her misery, and Dunphy thought: I wish to God my wife cared that much about me.
The worst was yet to come. It was time to dispose of Edward’s personal things. Florence offered to help her, but Mary said, “No. Edward would have wanted me to do it.”
There were so many small, intimate things. A dozen pipes, a fresh can of tobacco, two pairs of reading glasses, notes for a medical lecture he would never give. She went into Edward’s closet and ran her fingers over suits he would never again wear. The blue tie he had worn on their last night together. His gloves and scarf that kept him warm against the winter winds. He would not need them in his cold grave. She carefully put away his razor and toothbrushes, moving like an automaton.