“A Single Tear” by Roberta Whitman Hoff

A SINGLE TEAR

Roberta Whitman Hoff

The nurses say it’s not a real tear, that happens all the time, pools out of the orbital bone and down on the face of a person in a coma, his stilled tired cheek his wife has kissed and rubbed against hers every sunrise, his silent voice beyond the hearing of busy people, nurses and doctors, the science of an intensive care unit.

Inside this body his feelings live loudly and he speaks only to himself perhaps as if in a dream hearing the outside world and trying to wake, as if he were thinking what he said yesterday, I don’t want to leave this body this life with my wife, my young son, how much I love and love . . . and long . . .

Try harder, he thinks and the sheets wrap his body and he feels her hand breathe at the edge, she is weeping silently in shallow breaths, the doctors have said, he won’t wake, so she thinks the clean sheets wrap his dying skin in a blessing as he cries in the void encased by a wilderness of technology holding him on as she holds his hand. Touch. A language lingering on flesh, mind thinking a life longing like a dream, their blind spirits touch in the air of the room, a grieving stillness.

The nurse tells the wife that her presence stabilizes his vitals on the screens at the desk. The nurse smiles when she says this, the wife feels there’s hope in the confusion, this inexplicable language of coma, the tear falling off his cheek in the shape of a vase.