The Prayer He Finally Asked For
It was two in the morning, the second Thursday of January, when my husband said my name into the dark.
“Lo.”
I had been lying in the recliner beside the hospital bed with a quilt over my knees. The oxygen machine was humming the way it had hummed since Tuesday, a low steady sound like a refrigerator in another room. I was not asleep. I had not really slept since Monday.
“I’m here,” I said.
“You awake?”
“I’m awake, Arlen.”
He was quiet so long I thought he had drifted off. The streetlight at the end of our lane threw a little yellow square on the ceiling, and he was looking at it. Seventy-five years old, and the hardest man in three counties, and he looked like a boy waiting to be told whether he was in trouble.
“I want to tell you something,” he said. “I never told it to anybody.”
I sat up and put my feet on the cold floor.
I will get to what he told me. But first you have to know how we came to that room.
The doctors in Lafayette had said it plainly on Monday morning.
The cardiologist had kind gray eyes and had seen Arlen four times since the fall. He did not sit down. I noticed that. Doctors with good news will sit down, and doctors with the other kind will stand.
“Mr. Lorenz, your heart is pumping at about fifteen percent,” he said. “We talked in November about what we could try. We have tried it. I am sorry. I don’t have another step.”
Arlen had his seed cap in his lap. He turned it a quarter turn.
“How long?”
“Weeks. Possibly less. I would plan on going home and being comfortable. There is a hospice group in your county.”
“Home,” Arlen said.
“Yes, sir.”
“Well.” He put the cap on. “Thank you, doctor. I appreciate you being straight with me.”
That was all. He shook the man’s hand, one firm pump and let go.
We drove the seventy miles home with the heater ticking. Our daughter Sheryl lives up in Naperville, and I had told her on the phone to wait until the weekend. The fields were brown stubble under a white sky.
Arlen did not say one word all the way to the Pinkney town limit.
When we passed the Methodist church, he turned his head and looked at it the way he always did, the way a man looks at a house he used to live in. Then he faced the road again.
“I am not dying in a rented bed,” he said at last.
“It’s covered by hospice.”
“Then I will die in it for free,” he said, and the corner of his mouth moved.
That was my husband. Fifty-three years of that man.
You should know who Arlen Lorenz was.
He farmed four hundred and ten acres of corn and beans and ran forty head of cows on the creek ground his father had worked before him. He got up at four-thirty every morning of his life. He never raised his voice. When Arlen looked at a man across a sale barn aisle, the man generally found a reason to look at his boots.