The Last Healthy Meal

Marcus stood at the kitchen counter, the steel blade flashing as he chopped spinach for the salad Elena would never eat. Three months since the stroke, and her appetite had vanished along with her speech, leaving behind this vacant, doll-like creature who watched him from the hospital bed they'd installed in the living room.

"You need to eat, El," he said, his voice cracking. He'd stopped crying weeks ago—his body had simply run out of tears.

The food pyramid magnet on the refrigerator mocked him. All those years they'd spent building their health together: morning swims at the YMCA, quinoa instead of white rice, wine only on weekends. And now here she was, withering away while he force-fed her organic greens like a desperate gardener trying to revive a plant that had already decided to die.

He remembered their trip to Egypt, how they'd climbed to the base of the Great Pyramid at dawn, breathless and giddy, holding hands as the sun rose over the ancient stone. "We'll build something that lasts," she'd whispered. They had—a mortgage, a 401(k), a marriage that had survived infidelity and infertility and the slow erosion of time.

Now he felt like a zombie moving through the life they'd made, automating the tasks that once held joy: pill sorters at 8 AM, bed baths at noon, pureed vegetables at 6 PM. The hospice nurse called him a saint. He felt like a coward, unable to let go even when her own eyes begged him to.

He set the bowl of spinach on her tray, the familiar copper tang of the leaves filling the room. Her gaze drifted past him to the window where the pool lights shimmered in the darkness. They were supposed to be swimming in Hawaii right now, celebrating thirty years.

"I'm tired too," he whispered, taking her cold hand. The spinach wilted on the tray between them as, somewhere outside, the automatic pool cleaner continued its endless, fruitless laps through the water.