The summit

Wendy lay in the bed sleeping.  At this point she was a living thing.  I was going to say, "She was just a living thing."  But I can't seem to bring my self to use that sense of the word "just" as in "simply", "merely", "only", etc. . with regard to Wendy.  There is very little about Wendy that can be described as "just this" or "just that."  She wasn't "just!"  She wasn't "just" anything.

But on that Sunday morning she lay there sleeping with the nasal cannulas in her nose and the machine whirring and hissing in the background.  It was like the oxygen generator was gasping for her.  She laid there motionless.  Her chest imperceptibly moving.  The mass of Wendy that occupied that bed that morning was but a fraction of what she was a month earlier.  She could no longer support herself in any other position other than horizontal.

All the beauty, all the grace, all the wonderful little intricacies that were Wendy lay there in that bed.  All the lovely words that were spoken in love in anger in laughter  in question and in truth lay there in that bed.  Those eyes that looked at me in dis-belief when I asked her to marry me - that looked at me in confusion about what was happening to her during her last few days of consciousness lay there in that bed on that grey day in December.

It became apparent at some point between the time Larry left and noon that that day would be the day she would summit.  I didn't see it as a summit though.  I didn't even know I was on a mountain.