Elder Orphan

         “Mrs. Tomaszewksi, Mrs. Tomaszewski,” said a male voice.

         He pronounced it, “Thomas-zoo-skee,” instead of the correct way, “Thomas-shevsky,” but I was not annoyed enough to answer the voice, which seemed to come from the top of a very long, narrow well, so far away that I could barely hear it. I’m reminded of that wilderness survival advice that if you’re lost and cold, no matter how tired you get, you mustn’t fall asleep. Because if you do, you could die. That’s how I felt: so beat I would rather freeze than resist the allure of sleep.

         A hand jostled my shoulder. “Mrs. Tomaszewski!”

         I squinted up at a dark-haired man in a white coat with a stethoscope dangling from his neck. I glanced at the wall-clock: At 7 a.m., the hospital hadn’t yet opened. The computer screens behind the receptionist’s desk were like a row of blank faces and the muted walls of the unlit room, hope-defying beige. 

         Almost two hours before, I had swept the magazines off the table-top—the only flat surface besides the floor—rolled up my sweatshirt for a pillow and curled on my side to get some badly needed rest after almost two straight nights without sleep.

         “I just got married,” I now said to the doctor, rubbing the crust from my eyes. “No one’s ever called me that before.”

         “Congratulations.” He smiled. “You can see your husband now.”

         See your husband now. Not the words that, having turned fifty-three a year earlier, I expected to hear. I remembered the morning I had chatted with my office mate at Boston University, half tearfully and half comedically complaining about a new and alarming term I had recently learned.

         “Elder orphans,” I told Rebecca. “It’s a thing.” 

         Along with the promotional material I had received from AARP that spring, clickbait had mysteriously appeared in my social media feed about an emergent phenomenon: men and women—but mostly women—who reach old age without adult companionship or grown children to look out for them; hence the moniker, “elder orphans,” a term synonymous with Not What You Hoped For.

         “You can move to my town,” Rebecca said. “We love you—we’ll take care of you.”

         More than ten years younger than me, Rebecca had two young children and an elderly father suffering from memory loss. I couldn’t see myself adding to her burden, though I loved her dearly for the offer. I laughed it off, but my terror was real.

         I had spent most of my adult life alone, even though I had been married twice, short unions that fizzled like defective matches. My teenaged son was so angry and alienated after a lengthy custody case that I didn’t know if he’d ever come home after boarding school. My therapist and I had been working on what she called “a good enough life.”

         “You have friends, and meaningful pursuits, and a good job,” she said. One could make a satisfying life without a partner. After months of alternately sobbing and venting, I had valiantly gritted my teeth and leaned into the good-enough, middle-aged, single life, still harboring the dread that I would become an “elder orphan.”

         That had been less than eighteen months before. Now I was separated by swinging doors from the man who had given me not merely a good enough life, but an extraordinary life, even for the short amount of time that I had known him.

         Long before I worried about being an elder orphan, long before I was a divorcée, I had been orphaned in other ways. An introvert in an extroverted family, the eldest daughter of an unhappy marriage, the kid on the receiving end of my parents’ resentment and aggression. But the man who lay on the other side of the swinging door had given me a crack at normalcy. A home and companionship, and shared pursuits.

         Love.

         Now he lay in a surgical gurney, maybe even the same gurney over which we had wed mere hours before. No hail of rice or tossing of a bouquet awaited us. We would not leave for a honeymoon. Unbeknownst to the doctor, I hadn’t taken John’s name. I already knew that ours was a marriage out of the ordinary but confined by it, and out of time, not as in insufficient time, but rather, abiding in the perpetual present. Ascendant hopes—in wedding-speak, “looking forward to” and “building a life together”—flattened when one was living near death. You kept the vigil it assigned you, the same way lungs could do nothing but breathe.

         In such circumstances, marriage promised neither companionship nor comfort. Instead it offered a whiff of wisdom, a prescription for courage, and the knowledge that someone would mourn me for a lifetime, were I gone too soon.

         I might still one day be left alone, and that would hurt. But real love, I would learn, is ungoverned by the physics of separation. I wouldn’t be an orphan, because I’d know I had been beloved.