Becoming Miss Lee

Epilogue - Joseph's Farewell

When I awoke this morning, nothing could have prepared me for what was about to happen. She had woken up just like every other day. We had been married 27 years just a week earlier, and her long dark hair had become startling silver. God, she looked like starlight. She glowed with happiness. She had few wrinkles, even at 63, and she had barely changed since the day I had asked her to marry me. Her birthday was in a few months, and I had planned to get her a copy of Tristram Shandy. Even if she already had one, it had been read through so many times that the cover was becoming well worn and the pages were beginning to be stained yellow. I wanted to see her face when she opened the paper and saw it. I wanted to see her eyes light up like they always did when she was happy, to see her glow even brighter than she normally did.

Yet it was not to be.

I was working out in the garden that day while she had been inside with Martha and her friend Pelly. It was a warm day and I had been planting some vegetables of some sort when there was a scream from inside. I looked up from what I was doing when Pelly rushed out and screamed at me to come inside. I could sense that something was terribly, horribly wrong. I threw down the hoe and sprinted across the yard as fast as my legs could carry me in my advancing age. Pelly pointed up the steps, where I found an inconsolable Martha hovering over the bed. I didn't want to look. I didn't want to see my Bea in anything less than her regular busy self, but there she was.

Her breathing was labored, her eyes shut in pain, and her mouth contorted into a grimace as one hand clutched her chest in agony. Her long silver hair was pooled across the pillow and matted to the side of her head by sweat, but when she looked up at me, I saw her smile. She was in unbearable pain, yet she smiled for me because she knew that it hurt me to see her like that. She wanted me to believe that she was fine, even if we both knew that she wasn't. "Joe..."

Her hoarse voice stirred me from my trance and I flung myself down onto my knees beside her and clasped one delicate clammy hand in mine, "It's all right, darling, I'm right here."

Martha ran to her other side and followed suit, and the two of us held her hands as she grimaced from the pain in her chest again and groaned against it. "Mama, you will be just fine. Yes. You... You just need to rest." She kissed her mother's hand over and over again.

Bea shook her head with a sad smile, "No... No, Martha, dear, I am dying. I shall hold you under no illusions."

"Don't talk like that!" I begged. I could not bare to lose her. Not after everything we had endured together, not after all that I had done to make her happy with me, not after I had fallen hopelessly and madly in love with her and grown so accustomed to waking up and seeing her sparkling eyes smiling back at me. "It's as Martha says... You just need to rest."

"Joe... My Joe..." She smiled at me as a tear fell from her eyes and dripped to the corner of her mouth. "You have to let me go, Joe."

Those words bit into my heart unlike anything I had ever heard. Let her go? Impossible. She was my star, the only woman in my world that I had ever loved. I could not just let her go. I loved her. With every ounce of my soul, I loved her. "No. No, I won't. Stop talking like this."

She turned to Martha, "You take care of Joe and your brothers when I am gone, do you understand. They... Need a lady's touch."

Martha nodded slowly and choked back a sob, she buried her face into Bea's chest and she stroked her daughter's hair lovingly as she turned back to me with a grimace, "Bea... No."

"Joe... They're waiting for me." I couldn't understand. Who? "They've been waiting a long time, Joe."

That was when I realized what she meant and I gripped her hand even tighter, "They can wait, dammit! I need you here! I need you with me, here, on the farm!"

"These years here with you, Joe, have been the happiest years of my life, but now, you have to let me go." When I finally got the courage to look her in the eyes, she was so at peace, as if she knew exactly where she was headed, and it broke my heart. I paid no mind to the hot painful tears, and the look she had forced me to resign myself to the painful reality that my wife of 27 years was dying and knew it. She looked back up to the ceiling and asked, "What day is it?"

I did not know why she asked, but I replied anyway, "It is the 22nd of September..."

I saw a smile flicker on her lips and she shut her eyes, making several large tears stream down her cheeks, "It's that day then. The same day... Joe, I love you... Martha, Richard, Abe... I am, as I ever was and forever shall be... madly in love with you all. And now... I am ready."

There was a moment when her breath seemed to stay suspended in her lungs before it came out slowly, carefully, for the final time. Martha clasped her hand over her mouth to stifle her scream of anguish and all I could do was stare blankly at the unmoving form lying where Bea used to be. Nothing felt real. The world seemed to hang still in the air as Martha sobbed into her mother's stomach in inconsolable anguish. It took her hand turning cold for me to realize that she was gone.

My wife, Beatrice Fisher Lee Knowles, died September 22nd, 1822, the same day as the first and true love of her life, 46 long years later. And on that day, my heart died, too.