The Flower Arrangement by Ella Griffin

His nose traces the stench to a bedpan covered with a sheet of paper towel on the metal trolley by the sink. A nurse was called away earlier and forgot to come back for it. The smell of shit and the shame of it are too much.
    Margaret turns when the pump beeps. “You should be careful with that stuff.”
    â€œJesus Christ! Give me a break, will you? I’ve got inoperable lung cancer. I’ve got secondaries in parts of my body I didn’t know existed until a few months ago. And my daughter’s marriage might be on the rocks.”
    â€œA wise man told me once”—her eyes are mocking beneath her fringe—“that if you get into bed with self-pity, you’re the one who ends up getting screwed.”
    â€œFucked.” His voice is sharp. “I said fucked, not screwed. And I’m not sorry for myself. I’m sorry for Lara.”
    He was wrong before. Phil is the sorted one, not Lara. A mother dying at any age is difficult for a girl, but he can’t think of a worse time then twelve years old, when she needs her mother most. He did his best. He turned away from his own grief and poured his love and support into her. He was her protector till Michael came along, and now she might need him again.
    â€œI can’t die,” he says quietly.
    â€œOh come on!” Margaret laughs softly. “She’ll survive without you. That’s what children are designed to do, you know.”
    He wants to storm out of the room the way he used to back when they rowed, because they did row sometimes. But he doesn’t even have the strength to put his hands over his ears to shut out what she says next.
    â€œGet over yourself.” She shakes her head. “You’re going to bepushing up the daisies pretty soon. Wallowing in self-pity and pickling yourself in morphine isn’t going to change that.”
    â€œGet out!” He tries to shout but his voice comes out as a faint whisper. “What are you even doing here?”
    â€œYou tell me.” She walks to the door, tall and slender and beautiful and alive. So alive that it hurts to look at her and he has to find the pump, press it with his thumb.
    He hears her voice as he drifts away on the sea of morphine; she is mocking him. “Aren’t you going to say ‘I love you’ in Swahili or Urdu, Ted?” A pause. “Aren’t you going to say good-bye?”
    *   *   *
    He never could say it, not while Margaret was dying, not even after she was dead. He tried. He stayed in the small room where she had spent the last four weeks of her life. He sat beside her until it got dark outside, until her hand was stiff and cold as a windowpane on a frosty morning. From time to time one of the hospital staff came along and tried to reason with him, but he would not be separated from his wife. The lights in the ward went off and still he sat there. He told her he loved her over and over, in Dutch and Danish and Polish and French and Thai. But he couldn’t say good-bye.
    Margaret was buried on the tenth of January in the red coat he had bought her for Christmas, the one she would have loved and had never got to wear. He wanted her to be warm in the afterlife, which he knew made absolutely no sense. There were other things that made no sense. He kept on buying her flowers. That first Friday after the funeral, he drove into town and walked down from St. Stephen’s Green to the stall on Grafton Street. He only meant to look, but before he could stop himself, he had bought a bunch of white roses.
    He drove across the city to the graveyard. He wanted to rip the petals off and scatter them on the ugly mound of dirt. No. He wanted to claw through the dirt and climb in beside her. But he had to make a choice right then, before it was too late. Grief for his wife or love forhis children? Which was it going to be? The living or the dead? He started the engine. He drove home. He gave the roses to