ANNA WILHELM
THE PROCESS A week or two before death, the skin begins to lose circulation and the nail beds and fingertips turn a purple-blue. At least that’s what I’ve read. What I noticed is that his skin got softer with each passing day. It was constantly coated in a layer of oil that felt like beeswax. For the years running up to Don’s death, all the corners in his house turned to the crumbled dust of abused sheetrock and caved-in door frames. Don was ninety-two years old and his Hoveround, a motorized wheelchair, had run into the edges of every doorway and corner countless times. Four years before Three weeks after graduating high school, I moved to Boise, Idaho. Within a month, I was hired to get Don breakfast and lunch and keep the loneliness at bay. His wife, Evelyn, had died in a house-fire a month after 9/11, five years before. All I knew from Don was that he couldn’t carry her out. What I knew from his children was that she only ever cooked on high (most of their meals were charred), she was a school teacher back when they couldn’t be married and still keep their jobs (it’s why she reached thirty before settling down with a younger man), and she was kind and compassionate and put up with having an obsessive compulsive husband and six children without ever complaining. Don never even said her name. 47
