The associative memories are powerful, yet remade in a new context. I sat in my leather chair in the middle of the living room, Steve lay sleeping on the couch with his back to me, the hum of the oxygen generator filling the space between us. Sunlight shines outside and the room feels light as air, yet my heart feels the aching weight of loss. 

So this is how it’s going to be, I’m thinking. This is how it will feel when I’m living alone, the last one standing in this giant house.

I look down at the laptop where I’m catching up on emails and making final tweaks on the syllabus for a summer course. It’s busy work, the kind that distracts me from that sinking feeling that comes with grief of anticipated loss.

But when I look up again at the dark blue sofa, it appears empty and I hear only silence. 

So this is how it’s going to be, I’m thinking. This is how it will feel when I’m living alone, the last one standing in this giant house.

I remember sitting in this chair in the living room at Jerome Lane, attempting to do my doctoral studies at a rolling desk while Keith lay on the couch in pain. But I couldn’t do the work. I quit for that summer of 2012, unable to mentally process a null hypothesis in the quantitative research methods course that began just as Keith was being diagnosed. I later finished that doctorate – with Steve’s emotional support. He made it possible to push forward, to concentrate on all the things, including making sense of the workshops and property on Perry Road. 

Together we would make a life – for me after Keith. And for Steve it was after his divorce. Together we could heal each other’s pain.

But now, in the living room of this new home we built together on this special property on Perry Road… after losing Keith beforehand, then my mother before it was finished, and my dad at the start of Covid, all of them gone… I try to prepare myself for losing Steven.

He’s still here, yet consciousness is an evasive state of being. 

I sit here in my leather chair, my laptop open, but I’ve given up on getting any real work done, and scroll through social media instead.

Same chair, different space.

Flowers that dear Steve asked his son to arrange to send to me on Mother’s Day this year. My birthday was just a little over a week before but life was too hectic with the end-of-semester rush and Steve’s 24-7 care to coordinate. Yet during one of those quieter times, out of my earshot, Steve had the presence of mind to ask his son for this favor. Love finds a way.