End Grain

In her final days, my wife begins hoarding furniture. She’s grown so weak that she can’t leave her bed, but she insists on flipping through local catalogs, circling all the wooden chairs, end tables, and nightstands she wants in red marker. “There’s a particular oak armoire,” she tells me. “A one-of-a-kind piece. Saw it years ago around here.” But she’s too weak to go out searching, and she can’t remember more than “it has this end-grain look,” so she contents herself with her unexplained love of all things wooden and carved and practical. Armoires are her favorite. Beautiful, hand-crafted armoires with whole universes of drawer space, armoires that smell like hardwood forests, with doors that open like fairy portals. I sit on the end of our bed and order each one for her. She hands me the catalog with its dog-eared pages and circled items, then watches, hawk-eyed, as I make the calls, whispering, “Make sure that’s cherry!” or “The Cuban mahogany, not the Honduran!” as I speak with the sweet-voiced salesgirls. My wife is a tough, loud woman, even with the cancer ravaging her in its last stage, and there is something in me that, even now, believes her incapable of demise. Our grown daughter, Celia, has moved back to assist with her care, and neither of us has the guts to ask why, suddenly, she cares about new furniture. She says things like, “If I’m gonna die, for fuck’s sake let me have that walnut dresser.” Or, “Christ, Dan, if my dying wish is for this cherry footstool, are you really going to tell me no?” The answer is, of course, no. I will not be the one to tell my dying wife no, to deny her simple wish to surround herself with what she loves, even if I do find it strange that a woman confined to a bed craves an armoire in her last days. She has a thirst for hardwoods. She wants to be encompassed, she says, by the smoothness of sanded maple, to be flanked by the sturdy thickness of oak. For years, the basement and spare bedroom were full of her old clothes, boxes of our daughter’s childhood artwork, shoes that my wife might wear one day, bins of craft-fair angels and Christmas ornaments, all of which she forbade me to purge. Yet now, in the final months of her life, it’s all shoved into one ceiling-high mountain to