I cried; I’ll admit it. After the doctor told me the news, I became teary-eyed and my bones felt hollow. He relayed the estimated survival rates of how long I had left like he was reading the statistics out of a textbook. This was my life! And here is this young doctor in his thirties, fresh out of medical school maybe, with his whole career ahead of him. His life was blossoming and he was telling me mine was ending in “three months to five years.” What kind of time span is that? I stared at him with my tear-blurred vision and wondered while half listening to his recited speech if these kind of talks were taught at med school. I shivered.


After being given prescriptions and pamphlets describing the stages of health deterioration I would be experiencing, around what time I would be experiencing them, when to call the doctor, treatment options, etc. Just papers saying when and how I was going to die. I folded them and crammed them in my purse.


In the lobby of the hospital I locked myself in a bathroom stall and cried with sobs that shook my ribs; hands on both sides of the stall to keep myself from collapsing. I wished Darrel was there. I missed my mother. I thought of my brothers and sisters. And the children I never had.
I had never felt so alone in my life.
After washing my face in the sink and gathering my things, I went home. The house was the same home I’d been living in for the past forty years. I’d always hated it; it was too big for me to clean. It had three stories, five bedrooms, two kitchens, and four bathrooms. We had bought it with intentions of filling it with a large family, but the Lord had other plans for us. It was old when we first moved in, definitely a project, but Darrell and I worked hard on remodeling it to keep it up with modern trends. After developing arthritis in my knees, I complained often that I wanted to move into a smaller home so I wouldn’t have to toil up and down stairs to do simple tasks like laundry, or walk up from the driveway. Darrell loved the house and after all the work he’d done on it, didn’t want to leave it.
I fell down the stairs while he was out one day and I broke my ankle and fractured my right arm in two places. He found me at the bottom of the stairs in the garage, broken and bleeding. After that incident, he agreed to moving somewhere more accomidable. Darrell died shortly afterwards of a heart attack, and I couldn’t leave the house. It had too many memories. If I left the house, I would be leaving him.
Once inside, I turned on the television and sat down to watch my soaps. It was my normal routine. I felt like I needed to be doing something else now that I was dying. What was my first step? Call everyone and tell them I was checkin’ out soon? Shoot, they’ve been expecting me to drop dead once I hit my seventies... All of my brothers and sisters had passed on before me. And I never had any children. I have nieces and nephews, but they rarely came to visit or check up on me. No doubt in my mind that telling them about my cancer wouldn’t surprise or stir them at all.
I was old. And old people die.
“’Tis the last rose of summer
Left blooming alone;
All her lovely companions
Are faded and gone;
No flower of her kindred,
No rosebud is nigh,
To reflect back her blushes,
To give sigh for sigh.”
I find it cruel irony that my name is Rose. Really, it was supposed to be Rosa, but the nurse wrote Rose on the birth certificate.