“I CAN’T THANK YOU ENOUGH FOR TAKING CARE OF ME ALL OF THESE YEARS.”

Those were the last words he spoke to his wife before he died. And those were the words his wife related to me during a haircut recently, a couple of days before Thanksgiving.

I had just sat down in the barber’s chair, fading into a benign hypnotism of vanity and small talk, when an older woman walked in - thus raising the population of the shop from 2 to 3.

Like any barber who seeks to pass the time, mine can be a master at meaningless chitchat;
and along those lines, she nonchalantly asked the lady how her husband was doing.

“Oh, he died last week.”

It was like a bomb dropped on the easy dynamics of this quiet shop - the next thirty minutes were not going to be easy for me; I couldn’t just stick my head in a magazine and lose the time.

He was her life companion, she confided in us
as she saddled up to the empty adjacent chair…"and now he is gone."
Suffering to the end, he had gallantly emerged from his prolonged silent pain
only to express a few earnest words
of thanks to his wife,
for a shared life.

Now she sits here waiting for her turn in the chair;
Turns out, even devastated people need someone to cut their hair.

At first something deep inside of me resented her for putting this on us. Yet picking the less uncomfortable option, I engaged her and asked her about her plight.

But then something funny happened…after a few minutes of discussing the vastness of her loss,
I felt a lifting of some veil...liberation from a barrier;
increasingly I was gaining a new intimacy with these two souls.

Turns out, this is not her burden solely, a common enemy unites us. This/the/a conversation about death always lies under the surface, simmering...try as we might to hold a lid over the popping pot.

Eventually, the conversation turned to the makings of a good Thanksgiving dinner, and the more we talked about our favorite sides, ingredients, preparation, and presentation, the more it seemed to be the only thing worth talking about.

The newly widowed woman began to light up somewhat, as she cheerfully recalled the family meals she had pridefully prepared in the past - something I can only imagine factored into her husbands eternal words of gratitude.

On the way out, I met her eyes and said goodbye.
On the way home, I decided I must learn to cook.