March 31. As I write this column, it’s Easter Sunday, a special day of colored eggs, kids with baskets, ladies in hats, pews full of bowed heads whispering to God.

So tonight as they come to change her new room, it seems She’s “better.” That doesn’t mean She’s improving; it means She’s no longer “critical or “intensive.” It means She’s in “comfort care” on the way to the other side.

Many, if not most of you, are familiar with these terms, especially the way I’ve always referred to her as “She” with a capital “S.” In order to keep my focus and sanity, I will continue to do that. So I’m not going to get bogged down with definitions.

“She” made me promise long ago to avoid spending my last years of writing, mourning and spewing out maudlin memories of our last days. Not to worry. It’s not gonna happen like that.

You all know our stories and you all have stories of your own.

This time out, on this Sunday morning, I will share a sweet happenstance with you that brightened the dark day with my daughters as we moved Kay to a smaller, brighter room on the second floor of MaineGeneral hospital.

A voice from behind me whispered, “J.P.?”

It came from one of the head nurses on duty that day.

“I saw your name on the night sheet today and I knew it was you.”

It was nurse Sue Cote, a familiar face from the brick home across the street from where we had settled in our home, in the middle of Kay’s seventh year at the Waterville Junior High as a teacher of math and Spanish.

Because Kay had come back home to Waterville from a theater background — that included four years with the American Academy of Theater and a show on the Broadway stage with her classmate and friend Robert Redford — she was given the side job of theatrical director of the school drama department.

She jumped at the chance to teach theater skills to young actors.

This led to several years of staging plays on the tiny stage up on River Road.

The winter of 2007, she staged the one-act version of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s “The Secret Garden” and selected the perfect girl for the crucial part of “Mary.”

The girl was 12-year-old Emily Cote, who was reluctant to set foot on the school’s stage, especially when older, more experienced girls were eager to play the role.

But Kay was determined to have Emily and persuaded her to accept. She did. I saw the play and Kay was right.

Kay went on to stage other plays, but still remembered how Emily, in Kay’s words, “breathed life” into the part of Mary.

Emily Cote went on to have a rich, successful life, not on the stage but as a school teacher and caregiver to people of impaired hearing.

This night as the sun goes down, nurse Sue Cote, the mother of Emily Cote, in whom Kay saw a bright light, is holding the hand of my dying wife, Katherine Joly Devine, and whispering the last act of “The Secret Garden.”

For this writer, the dark world this night has become a “Secret Garden.”

J.P. Devine is a Waterville writer. 

Copy the Story Link

« Previous

Movie Review: ‘The Zone of Interest’ starts slow, grows richer, more compelling, J.P. Devine writes

Next »

J.P. Devine Podcast: A familiar face in an unlikely place