"Does it hurt, dying?" Carolyn asked softly as the nurse gave her mother another shot of pain medication.
"No, dear, morphine actually makes patients very comfortable and relaxed," the woman in white replied as she expertly placed her fingers on the faint pulse in Emily's wrist. "She's breathing easier now because all the pain is gone. The doctor increased her dosage."
Captain Gregg materialized in the guest room as the nurse left for the kitchen and a cup of coffee.
"You've done everything you can, Madame, to make her passing as easy as possible," he murmured. "And you already know the answer to the most troubling question of all – the one on everyone's lips about death."
"I always thought knowing of your ghostly afterlife would somehow ease the pain of losing her. Make me more at peace with what's happening." Her eyes filled with tears again, and her voice broke. "It doesn't work that way in the end, you know."
"Perhaps not on your side of eternity, m'dear," the Captain replied, seating himself on the other side of the deathbed. He crossed his legs and placed a hand on the blanket next to Carolyn's. "And the answer is no. She will neither see nor hear me at the end."
"Martha did."
"Only briefly, just enough time to joke that she hoped I wasn't the 'one' G-d sent to take her home," Captain Gregg mused with a smile. "But then a man in uniform appeared. Suddenly Martha was young again, and her fiancée really and truly home from the war. She vanished, just like that, with the handsome man who died at Normandy."
"Do you think Dad will come back to get Mother?" Carolyn stroked her mother's forehead, smoothing back the gray hairs.
"Madame, contrary to appearance, I am not privy to everything that transpires in the land of the thinning veil," he said. "My concern here is for the living."
"That would be something if she finally learned about us after her own passing," Carolyn smiled, with difficulty. "I suppose I'll always wonder whether I should have shared you with the rest of the family, but I just couldn't. Wouldn't. Mother definitely would not have approved of our co-habitation. Goodness knows what she might have said to Jonathan and Candy."
She placed her hand next to his, and finally, through it. They each stared, united in the only way possible in the physical realm, at their opaque fingers tightly knotted in love alone.
"I'll know I'm really dead when I finally feel the warmth of that hand," Carolyn whispered. "Surely death will not begrudge us that."
Emily arose from the bed and padded silently across the room to her husband.