The Man Who Slipped Away Each Night

“The last week she was mostly gone,” he said. “Didn’t know me most of the time. But seven o’clock would come and I’d walk in and start to read and something in her would settle. Her hands would stop their picking at the blanket. The nurses saw it. One of them told me, she doesn’t know your face anymore, Walt, but her body knows seven o’clock. It knows you’re coming. You’re the only clock she’s got left.”

Marion died on a Tuesday, in the early morning, not at seven, which he said he was almost grateful for, because it meant the last thing he did for her was not ruined by being the thing she died during. He got through the funeral. He got through the casseroles and the sorting of her clothes and the first Christmas. And then he found he could not get through seven o’clock.

“Every evening at seven,” he said, “my body stood up to go. Thirty four years of the mail and fourteen months of sitting with Marion, I am a creature of the clock, Meg, I cannot help it. Seven would come and I would stand up in my kitchen with nowhere to go and nobody to go to, and it was the worst hour of my day, every day, for a year.”

The chaplain from the care home had stayed in touch, a young fellow, and one day over coffee Walt had told him about seven o’clock, how it was killing him. And the chaplain had not told him to pray harder or join a group. He had said one thing. He had said: Walt, you have an hour every evening that your body has trained to love somebody. That is a rare gift and you are letting it go to waste on grief. There is somebody within a mile of wherever you are standing who has nobody at seven o’clock. Go be their seven o’clock.

“So that’s what I do now,” Walt said, there in the dark on the dock. “Everywhere I go. I find the care home. I ask who has nobody. And I go be their seven o’clock, for as long as I’m in town. I’ve done it in four states. I did it in a VA home in Des Moines for a Korea fella named Sy for most of a winter until he passed. I’d have told you, Meg. I was going to tell you. But it’s not a thing you lead with. It sounds like bragging and it isn’t. It’s just the only way I found to carry it.”