don’t have to do that for a long, long time.”
She suggested they get on with burying the goldfish, and Nathan agreed that this was the right thing to do.
Thirty years passed. Then a great sickness befell Nathan, a condition whose terminal nature was revealed to him one Summer afternoon by a doctor young enough to be his son. Nathan nodded as the litany of medical terms were carefully produced: metastases, genetic therapy, palliative care.
“It could be as long as a year,” ventured the doctor.
Nathan looked out the window. Heat scoured the heavens of clouds, save a single tremulous waft of water vapour over the far hills.
“Such a beautiful day,” he said. “It seems … inconceivable that news as bad as this can co-exist with that blue sky and that sun.”
The doctor mumbled a platitude. Nathan stood and thanked him, saying then:
“What’s that line Peter Pan says? Death must be an awfully great adventure.”
He laughed at this and slapped the table with a palm. The doctor shrank away, no doubt sensing that the diagnosis had awakened in Nathan the beginnings of madness.
“Oh, I don’t actually think that’s true,” said Nathan. “He doesn’t do much at all, in fact. To be honest though, I’ve even missed him. It’s been a lot of years. But I don’t think he’ll have changed much.”
As soon as he said it, Nathan appreciated the absurdity of the statement. He shook his head.
“I’ve pushed that stuff so far down that I had almost forgotten it all. Life just got in the way, you know? Now at the end I’m finally going to see him again. And that will kind of be an adventure.”
The doctor had by now vacated his desk and was at the door, opening it wide.
That afternoon, he told his wife and daughter. Amongst the tears, Nathan found his secret imbuing him with an increasing sense of guilt.
I feel sad for them rather than with them, he thought. My own impending death fills me with nothing but anticipation, God help me, and I can’t share their dread.
He sat with Andrea and Jane until late that night.
“I’ve had a good life,” Nathan said. “I couldn’t have wished for anything more.”
Jane leaned across the table and squeezed his hand.
“Don’t talk like it’s over,” she said.
He covered her hand with his.
“Of course it’s not,” Nathan said. “I just have no regrets, that’s all. You were the thing I was proudest of …” Her sudden crying stopped him, and his own eyes ran wet.
He leant forward and gathered his family into his arms, and they stayed like that for a good while.
Several months passed, and Nathan’s deterioration was imperceptible but no less assured. One afternoon he had too much morphine and awoke from an opiate-haze to Andrea’s insistent shaking. When he recovered, she revealed that he had told her to leave when Death came for him.
“I’m not going anywhere,” Andrea said. “If he wants you, he’ll have to get through me first.”
“My love, we have history,” he said, knowing that she would regard this as the befuddlement of the morphine. “We’re old friends, he and I.”
She kissed his forehead and told him to sleep.
Autumn came, and Nathan took to sitting on the back porch with Andrea as was their custom, talking for long hours. One afternoon, he sat alone; from the kitchen he could hear Andrea singing as she prepared their lunch. With the stilling of the wind, Nathan of conscious of how much he was waiting for the cadence of Death’s approach, the thrumming footfalls that had preceded his first appearance so many years ago.
A clutch of birds flitted from branch to branch among the trees. Nathan marvelled at how they moved seemingly as one organism.
What’s that behaviour in animals called, I wonder?
He followed the birds as they ascended the trunks until they were lost to him in the play of leaf and light.
A board creaked at the far end of the porch. Nathan shut his eyes, turned towards the sound, and when he looked again, he saw him there, just as he knew he would.
“Don’t let her see you,” Nathan said in a stern tone. “I don’t command you anymore, but I think you owe me that much.”
Andrea’s singing faltered; Nathan knew how much she loved this song, but she struggled with the lyrics of the second verse. He wanted to give her the words, as he was accustomed to, but found he could not.
Death walked towards him. Nathan fished the frog from a pocket and placed it over his heart. His voice broke, then he continued in a whisper.
“You need to take it with you too,” he said. “You hear me? Don’t you leave him here.”
The finger-bones reached for Nathan; he closed his eyes. At his breast, the frog pulsed its legs once and was still.
Inside, Andrea heard her husband speak briefly then give a small laugh.
That damn morphine, she thought. He’s lucid now but they still need to adjust the dose down.
She finished making their lunch and went to him. Nathan sat with his head slumped slightly forward as if in sleep. That laughter’s moment was at play yet in his mouth and face, but he breathed no more.
Andrea knelt beside her husband and wept.
At the end of Nathan’s funeral, Jeremy and Ian approached her. For the entirety of the proceedings they had sat separately and in silence at the rear of the hall. They made their introductions and then Jeremy spoke quickly:
“I need to know about a frog. Did he ever mention one or have one as a pet?“
Andrea said that he had owned pet frogs all his life, and was holding his favourite one when he died. Ian laughed, and quickly apologised.
“There’s no need,” she said, “Although you need to tell me why that would be funny to you.”
“That wasn’t many different frogs, but the same one,” he said.
“We found it together,” Jeremy said, “A very special frog that couldn’t be killed.”
“Was it … was it dead when you found him?” asked Ian.
“As dead as Nathan was,” said Andrea. “In fact, it’s in his casket, I slipped it into his top pocket at the funeral home.”
“Were you sure it was dead?” said Jeremy. “Not sleeping?”
She shook her head.
“Dead,” she said.
Ian and Jeremy both breathed deeply, as astronauts might when the portal of their sea-tossed capsule was removed and gusting air filled their lungs for the first time in an age. Ian wiped his eyes. Jeremy moved away from them to the coffin and regarded it for a long while.
Then, as Andrea and Ian watched, he knelt, put his ear to the side and rapped his knuckles on the wood. Andrea’s words of protest trailed away, for the intensity on Jeremy’s face absolutely belied that this was any attempt at mere prankery. Finally he looked back at the pair.
“I’ll have to take your word for it,” he said.
He walked back towards them saying as he brushed past:
“It’s good that the frog is dead. I’m sorry about Nathan.”
With that he was gone.
“What did he mean earlier, that it couldn’t be killed?” Andrea asked.
“It’s too much to take in now,” replied Ian. “You have a wake to go to”
“So do you,” said Andrea, and took his arms in hers. “I have to know everything. Nathan and I didn’t have any secrets, and what you’ve told me is a pretty big one, wouldn’t you say?.”
Ian nodded.
The wake was conducted according to Nathan’s direction, which included a hired jukebox stocked with music he knew his friends and family would like. Nathan’s brother pushed numbers on the keypad and stood back, shaking his head as heavy metal poured forth.
The lyrics were gutturally delivered by both Scott and the singer. Andrea could not understand much of the words, save the chorus:
“Be not proud, be not proud, be not proud!” yelled Scott, and she smiled at this 65 year old man in his head-down pose, waving greying locks
at an invisible guitar.
Finally he walked away from the jukebox, saw Andrea there and hugged her close.
“Pathogenic Demise, I love that band,” said Scott. “I was so into them. Nathan was too, but more through me, I guess.”
“What’s that song called?” she asked.
“It’s based on a John Donne poem, ‘Death Be Not Proud’.”
Andrea knew it. She hugged Scott back, saying:
Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings and desperate men
And dost with poison, war and sickness dwell
And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well
And better then thy stroke, why swell’st thou then?
Scott smiled and kissed her on her forehead.
Andrea could not bring herself to move Nathan’s favourite chair, and had made it home to the bouquets and flower arrangements brought by guests. She placed two others next to it, and sat with Ian.
“We dug well that Summer,” began Ian, and recounted the story in its entirety. To his surprise, Andrea neither expressed derision nor shook her head at a single word. He took pains to include their conflict over the Knight, and as he felt the old curiosity well within him.
“He seemed to have a part of the experience we didn’t, and I’ve always wondered if that was for good or ill,” he said.
He described the reunion, and mentioned again that they were veterans in some way. At this, Andrea nodded.
“He would get that look in his eyes, I could never place it, until I read its description in a magazine article about post traumatic stress.”
“The Thousand Yard Stare,” said Ian immediately.
Andrea smiled and repeated his words. At that moment Jane appeared with a plate of cookies. Her mother touched her hand and squeezed gently.
“Your dad was a