A time to die

Dorothy Creekmore eyed her husband of 62 years like he was a stranger.

She then marched into a conversation most couples tip-toe around; no time for anymore of that nonsense.

The Baptist believers sat across from each other in their tiny living room.

With Ed in his easy chair, Dorothy on the nearby couch and death waiting outside the door, chimes from a grandfather clock held off an awkward silence.

But only for a moment.

Dorothy made up her mind. She knew something Ed needed to hear.

"I'll have to go to the hospice again," the 84-year-old woman said.

Ed stared at her, thinking.

Dorothy stayed briefly at a local hospice last year while recovering from surgery. She liked the care there, finding one volunteer to play Scrabble with and another to make her a special-order BLT in the middle of the night.

After six decades of making meals for Ed, she sort of felt like a celebrity, she said.

But this visit would be different.

She wouldn't return home.

They both knew it.

"I don't know if it's a good idea," said Ed, who spends words like they're $100 bills.

"You don't?" asked Dorothy, pointing a serious finger in the air. "Well, I do. It's best."

Whenever Dorothy wanted to make a point, out came that finger.

The last thing she wanted -- after all these years of taking care of Ed -- was for him to take care of her. She wouldn't stand for it.

The couple stared at each other as a November storm whipped around their wrinkled, blue-collar Hammond home.

'I hope when I die'

Ten seconds passed. Twenty seconds. Finally, Ed looked away.

Under no circumstances, Dorothy reminded him, did she want to be kept alive by artificial means when the time comes. And that time was coming fast.

"The good Lord," she told her 88-year-old husband, "will take me in his own time."

Dorothy, who gives out hugs like they're smiles, lives with the certainty of heaven and Jesus' waiting arms. She knows every nook and cranny of the Bible. The good book. The only book, really.

She rarely speaks of death and dying, but when she does, it comes matter-of-factly, like talking about what's for dinner. And if tears leak out, they do so in private.

Months earlier, doctors told Dorothy she had terminal stomach cancer. Food wouldn't stay down. She's been starving to death ever since, one cell at a time.

Doctors ordered chemotherapy. No, Dorothy said. She couldn't abandon Ed's daily needs by agreeing to any debilitating treatment. Not even for one day.

Ed, resting an elbow on his walker, looked up and muttered, "I hope when I die I go to bed and never wake up."

Dorothy, who has hearing troubles, shouted "What?"

"Nothing," Ed said louder, his voice giving way to the sound of clocks.

Tick-tock, tick-tock

Silence here is measured by more than 50 timepieces.

Ed is a master craftsman who retired from Inland Steel about 200,000 hours ago. He's fascinated by clocks, building them from kits, hanging them in every room. Tick-tock, tick-tock, everywhere you go.

"If I come back in another life," Ed said one day, "maybe I'll be a clockmaker."

Yet, time here drags like someone is holding back the minute hand.

Weekly Scrabble games, nightly television shows and reading the morning obits have helped pass the time for Ed and Dorothy these last few decades.

And so does reading Scripture.

Each night before bedtime, they read their own Bibles, over and over, from "In the beginning ..." to "Christ be with you all, amen." And back again.

"I see something new each time," Dorothy said.

With failing eyes, she uses a large-print edition and a magnifying glass.

In mid-November, Dorothy read Isaiah, chapter 51: "Lift up your eyes to the heavens, and look upon the earth beneath ... they that dwell therein shall die in like manner: but my salvation shall be forever."

Ed, a slower reader, always follows a few books behind.

"You should try to keep up," she told him one day at the kitchen table.

Ed just shrugged, finishing his soup and spiced apples.

It was their 62nd wedding anniversary, Nov. 29.

A younger, more romantic Ed Creekmore, back in World War II, made Dorothy a seashell prayer bead from a New Guinea coral reef and a handkerchief fashioned from a parachute.

He also air-mailed her a fresh coconut with their address written on it.

"I had to climb up that tree, you know," Ed reminded Dorothy on their anniversary.

Dorothy, who still had the wrinkled, shrunken souvenir of their young love affair, could only smile.

"I know," she said.

'He can live off soup'

By early December, Dorothy's body began betraying her. She couldn't keep much down, mostly a piece of toast here, a cup of tea there.

She drinks a lot of Tang, though, joking that it "helped the astronauts."

Still, her weight had slipped this past year from 140 to 100 pounds.

"You're skin-n-bones," Ed told her one day.

"I can't help it," replied Dorothy, watching him eat a bowl of soup.

Since Ed returned from the war, Dorothy has cooked him a mess tent of soup.

"He can live off soup," she said, cleaning his bowl.

Dorothy, like many wives from her generation, consumes life in sips, not gulps. Those sips now came smaller each day.

A week later, Dorothy begins shredding old paperwork and planning on what Ed should do with the house after she's gone. Ed, she figured outloud, should sell the house and move into a place where someone else can take care of him.

"I'll be fine," grumbled Ed from the next room. "Just take care of yourself."

Dorothy rolled her eyes. Instead, she thought to herself how Ed can still shave and bathe himself, and how he can, if anything, heat up soup in the microwave.

'If I could just make it to Christmas'

A week before Christmas, Dorothy's body starting giving up hope. With a thin face, weak body and voice, she spends most days and nights on her bedroom lounge chair. A bucket for vomiting sits nearby. Nothing stays down.

"I want to sleep all the time," she told Ed, walking slowly to the kitchen.

There, alone, she stared at her backyard garden, barren this year after a season of neglect. She shook her head.

This would be Dorothy's first Christmas without a tree. She knew she wouldn't be around after the holidays to take it down. She didn't want to burden anyone with it.

She found the energy, however, to erect her little lighted "Christmas village" decoration. Starting at it, Dorothy sat on a kitchen chair, both hands on one knee, and hummed "Silent Night" amid a chorus of kitchen clocks.

Then her looming hospice stay popped to mind.

"If I could just make it to Christmas," she said.

She did. But barely.

'Her biggest pain'

After living nearly a half-century in her home, Dorothy Creekmore left there for good on Christmas Eve.

She'd be celebrating Jesus' birth from a strange bed in a home for the dying.

But first there were gifts to open.

Weak and frail, her body bowing to starvation, Dorothy unwrapped presents with Ed and their family, including son, Bill, and daughter, Sharon, who live in the region.

The two checked in on their parents more these past few weeks, ever since Dorothy's hope leaned more to faith.

By Christmas Eve, her appetite all but gone, Dorothy's weight dipped below 100 pounds. Food, now a foreign invader, wouldn't stay in her body.

Still, she insisted pain didn't exist.

"I'm her biggest pain," Ed once joked.

An empty bed

A day earlier, a bed became available at the William J. Riley Center in Munster, part of the Hospice of the Calumet Area program. Hospice nurses have been visiting Dorothy for months at home, regulating her medicine, checking her vitals, exchanging chit-chat about this and that.

Dorothy could be in that empty bed, a hospice nurse told her that day.

Since Halloween, Dorothy had a simple plan. Move into the hospice only when she could no longer care for herself. Or more importantly, care for Ed, who hasn't had to cook for himself for decades.

On Christmas Eve, her last, she got a new coat. She would only need it once.

Ed got an atomic clock, the kind that never needs to be re-set. It quietly ticked away Dorothy's last minutes at home with him.

After decades of making beds, sweeping stairs, cooking dinner and raising kids, Dorothy left home forever. It was her call, always had been.

With Christmas a day away and Jesus waiting for her in heaven, Dorothy knew her decision felt right.

Still, she said time and again, "You're never prepared enough for this."

That afternoon, Dorothy's family drove her to the hospice home, leaving behind her wedding ring and large-print Bible.

She wouldn't need her ring again. The Bible was another story.

"I'll be seeing you soon," she told Ed.

She did. But only once.

Prayers are in order

The day after Christmas, Dorothy and her creator seemed closer than ever.

Dorothy sat up alone in a bed at the William J. Riley Center; a nearby Bible her only companion at the moment.

The Baptist believer couldn't keep any food down.

Dying from hunger, she chose to end her life here. The decision, made between her and the good Lord, was final, despite Ed's rumblings the past few months.

Dorothy wanted to die on her own terms, not hooked up to some fancy machine while Jesus tapped his toes, she once said.

First, prayers were in order -- and one in particular for Ed.

That morning, she walked to the bathroom on her own, but fell, bumping her forehead. Nurses tended to her cut, fed her soup and rubbed her legs.

"Oh, that feels good," she told one.

Here, like at any hospice, it's not about cure, but care. It's not about if, but when.

Dorothy watched TV from her hospital-style bed, but mostly it watched her. A small fake Christmas tree comforted her from the corner of the sparse room.

She sipped Sierra Mist through a straw, whispering "It's not Tang" after a nurse left.

A wall clock measured each day. Tick-tock, tick-tock, a distant echo of home.

Quiet and alone, with her body shrinking in spirit and mass, Dorothy drifted back to happier times.

She remembered keeping cookies by her front door to feed the neighborhood squirrels, teaching Sunday school to retarded children, switching her given name, Domestalla -- which she didn't like -- with her cousin, Dorothy, and playing Saturday afternoon Scrabble tournaments with her sisters.

She also recalled how her mother died, decades ago, after falling asleep on a couch and never waking up.

'Come back soon'

Dorothy then wondered about Ed back at home and if his Bible, too, had been opened that night. She reached for the phone.

Ed -- never a chatty man -- now answers the phone with Dorothy out of the house. "He has to, he thinks it's me," Dorothy said, smiling.

After small talk, Dorothy purred, "I love you."

Ed, a Tennessee hillbilly who'd rather listen than speak, kept silent.

Dorothy rolled her eyes: "I have to squeeze it out of him."

"Come back soon," Ed said finally. "The house seems a lot bigger without you."

Dorothy didn't reply.

She hung up the phone and reached for a Bible. It wasn't her large-print one, but it would do.

Isaiah, chapter 66: "Thus saith the Lord, the heaven is my throne, and the earth is my footstool: where is the house that ye build unto me? And where is the place of my rest?"

"Oh," Dorothy sighed, drifting off to sleep, "I don't know what to do with myself."

Her body, however, had its mind made up.

Her sunken chest heaved with each breath. Her thin, wrinkled arms showed veins protruding through pale skin. Her tired eyes closed shut, and she fell asleep.

Not the peaceful sleep where Jesus stood with open arms, where her parents waited for her and where the roses never fade. That glorious day would come soon enough.

No, Dorothy knew she had time for more prayers before Ed's only visit.

'Tired'

Four days after Christmas, Ed visited Dorothy.

Having trouble getting around on his own these days, Ed rode with family from his Hammond home.

Wearing his trusty suspenders and pants hiked up nearly to his chest, Ed sat next to Dorothy in her room; twice the size of the couple's entire living room, but not nearly as bright.

They shared a Sprite. Dorothy took small sips while Ed helped hold the cup.

The Rev. Fred Standridge, their former pastor at Hessville Baptist Church, walked in.

"How are you Dorothy?"

"Tired."

Standridge pulled out a worn, beat-up Bible, with highlighted passages and scribblings in the margins. And he prayed.

Dorothy lowered her head, sat still as a statue, closed her eyes and mouthed the words. Then Amen.

"Give Dorothy a good hug today, Lord," Standridge said before planting a gentle kiss on her forehead.

He left Dorothy with a "parson to person" prescription, calling for scripture to be read three times a day and once at bedtime.

Dorothy, a dutiful patient, had trouble doing this, even with her large-print Bible now back at her side.

Just putting on her oversized glasses took serious effort.

"God understands," she said, managing a smile.

'Home'

A week later, Dorothy's white hair, always styled high in a perm, now laid down freely on her pillow, exhausted.

Her creased skin hung loosely around visible bones. Nurses fed her tea through a straw. She asked to look at a photo album on her nightstand, of her family's Christmas Eve together, her last day at home.

In a whispered grunt, she said, "home," and looked up blankly.

The Rev. Peter Marshall, the current minister at Hessville Baptist Church, walked in.

Dorothy, resting alone, tried propping herself up, but couldn't.

Marshall reached for Dorothy's hands -- the same hands that made thousands of meals, the hands that made a house a home for 60 years.

They were limp and soft and warm to the touch.

"We're all praying for you," he said, leading into prayer. "Our heavenly father ..."

Dorothy closed her eyes. Her mouth moved slightly with the scripture, the familiar soundtrack of her life.

When Marshall left, Dorothy leaned up with all her might, muttered "thank you" and plopped back down, spent.

Later, as a wall clock ticked overhead, she said a hushed prayer for Ed: "Lord, please take care of ..."

'The Broken Vessel'

Three days later, Jan. 9, Dorothy could no longer speak. Or read. Or pray aloud.

It's been days since she swallowed whole food. Or drank on her own.

If faith blazed inside Dorothy, she was unable to show it.

A cushion propped her head as nurses fed her drops of ice water through a syringe. Like a baby at bottle time, Dorothy's eyes locked onto the nurse's without saying a word.

Dee Firsich, a hospice volunteer, rubbed Dorothy's hands with lotion.

Firsich made Dorothy that special-order BLT sandwich during her recuperation visit here last year after surgery. Dorothy returned home at the time, tickled that a complete stranger cooked for her.

Firsich, tickled that Dorothy remembered her, smiled into her eyes and said, "Hello sweetie. What can I do for you?"

A gaze away, on Dorothy's nightstand rested her large-print Bible, bookmarked at Jeremiah, the last scripture she read. Across the top of the page reads, "The Broken Vessel."

"Stand in the gate of the Lord's house, and proclaim there this word, and say, hear the word of the Lord, all ye of Judah, that enter in at these gates to worship the Lord."

Two days later, Dorothy died.

It was a Sunday, her favorite day, she once said. The Lord's day.

'Dorothy pointed her finger at me'

On Jan. 15, a bone-chilling day, it took two pastors, Marshall and Standridge, to preach Dorothy into Jesus' arms.

But Lee Roy Floyd, a family friend, stole the show inside Bocken Funeral Home in Hammond.

Dorothy, while in the hospital, made Floyd promise to sing at her funeral.

"Well," Floyd told mourners in his Southern accent, "Dorothy pointed her finger at me and I knew that meant business.

"I looked at that finger and I said, 'What choice do I have?' " Floyd said, prompting a few laughs.

With guitar in hand, Floyd sang "The Old Rugged Cross" and "Where the Roses Never Fade": "Loved ones gone to be with Jesus, in their robes of white arrayed. Now are waiting for my coming, where the roses never fade."

Ed sat near Dorothy's open casket in front of God and everyone.

Later, at Calumet Park Cemetery in Merrillville, Ed and his walker slowly made their way from the blustery day into the sterile mausoleum. With everyone watching and waiting, men in dark suits finally sat him in a chair and carried him inside.

Ed forced a smile, forgiving all the attention.

He sat near Dorothy's casket for the brief eulogy, before strangers wheeled it away to the crypt they will someday share. Ed hasn't visited Dorothy since.

'Time goes too fast'

Nearly a month after his wife's death, Ed sat in his home and pulled out an old magazine clipping of Dorothy's, reading, "Things just don't happen. They're planned."

"She knew long before any of us," Ed said, shaking his head," but she didn't want me to know."

Then he pulled from his shirt pocket an appointment card for Dorothy's next doctor visit. It read: "6/9/04, 12:30 p.m." Ed always figured she'd make that visit.

"Hmph," he shrugged, sliding it back in.

If tears leak out of Ed, they do so in private.

It was lunch time. Ed ate soup -- again -- alone at the kitchen table, something he's getting used to after all those years of companionship.

"She was a good woman," he said. "She always thought of me first."

Ed heated up the soup -- homemade by a niece -- in the microwave, just like Dorothy figured.

On the kitchen counter were stacked a small mountain of microwavable Campbell's soups, for backup, next to Ed's atomic clock, from Christmas.

A small family of other kitchen clocks ticked away the silence around him. Tick-tock, tick-tock, everywhere you go. A grandfather clock chimed in the background.

"Time goes too fast these days," Ed said. "Way too fast."

He sipped instant tea from the mug that Dorothy always chilled in the freezer.

In the bedroom -- their bedroom -- Dorothy's bottled perfumes and nail polish remain untouched. A few bobby pins lie scattered near a smiling Dorothy, looking up from her drivers license photo.

Her magnifying glass gathers dust on the nearby table. Her recliner, the one she slept in each night before leaving home, still sits in the corner. Five bedroom clocks count down the time.

"I don't know where the time goes," Ed said, shaking his head.

Still, not much else has changed in his life.

Except one thing.

He reads a different Bible at night -- her Bible.

On this day, it's bookmarked at Job: "And where is now my hope? As for my hope, who shall see it?"

Some might view Ed reading Dorothy's Bible as a final act of endearment, a loving gesture, a living remembrance of his wife and their life together.

Ed, though, doesn't let on.

He took a last bite of soup, another sip of tea and matter-of-factly said, "The print is bigger."

Epilogue:

'Something is wrong ... inside'

In early April, three months after Dorothy's death, an ailing Ed backed into his favorite living room chair even slower than usual.

Since Dorothy died, Ed has lost about 20 pounds. And he doesn't know why.

"Something is wrong ... inside," Ed said, adjusting the suspenders that hold his pants up to his chest.

A weeklong hospital stay, pockmarked with too many tests, found nothing wrong, he said.

"They gave me pills," Ed said. "They don't help."

A sharp pain -- like something is gripping him tight and won't let go -- comes out of nowhere and attacks him in his midsection, he said.

"It hurts to walk or talk or ... anything," he said, the chimes of a grandfather clock interrupting his words.

It hurts so bad that he hasn't been downstairs to watch his big-screen TV in a few weeks. He's afraid he can't get back upstairs.

It hurts so bad that he hasn't thought about the notion he's suffering the same pains Dorothy felt before her death.

"I miss her being around to holler at me," he said, squeezing out a smile.

He still reads her Bible every night. He's on Psalms these days.

He hasn't been to the cemetery since Dorothy's funeral. Yet with her birthday on the horizon, he chewed on the idea.

But only for a moment.

"No reason to go," he said, shaking his head. "There's nothing there."

Ed Creekmore sat in his kitchen chair, looking at a barren garden once cared for by his wife of 62 years, Dorothy. A gray cotton sweatsuit has replaced decades of old suspenders, plaid shirts and pants hiked up to his chest.

His wrinkles, resolve and rebellion remain. As does his trusty walker, an attached basket filled with a cordless phone, the TV remote control and a black comb, in case company stops by.

Since Dorothy's death Jan. 11, Ed spends hours staring at birds flocking to an outdoor feeder. Father Time ticks away the quiet minutes on several timepieces in the couple's Hammond home.

"Dorothy always liked birds," Ed said without sounding sappy.

A World War II veteran with an aversion to modern medicine, Ed has dealt with consistent health problems, a few hospital stays and a five-week stint at a nursing home to regain his independence.

In June, he celebrated his 89th birthday there, telling a nurse, "The first 89 years were the hardest. The second 89 will be a lot easier." His cake read "It's not the age, it's the attitude."

In July, Ed was in so much pain he called 911 himself. An ambulance delivered him to help.

In August, he fell backwards in his home, hitting his head on a table and refracturing a vertebrae.

Earlier this month, Ed again stayed in a hospital, mostly for severe back pain. He's no stranger to morphine, pain patches and nurses calling him by his first name.

He also takes medication for Parkinson's disease. Back in 1999, long before Dorothy's cancer was detected, Ed wrote a brief letter addressed "To my dear sweet wife" letting her know he was feeling the disease's effects.

Cataracts and watery eyes get in his way of reading Dorothy's large-print Bible. Still, he keeps it in an end table next to his easy chair.

Like Dorothy, after she was diagnosed with stomach cancer, Ed has lost weight but for unknown reasons, going from 160 pounds to 135. He still eats soup, just not as much, not as often. He still loves candy, even joking about going trick-or-treating last month as a grumpy old man.

Ed's two children and relatives take care of him, though he still hasn't asked for a ride to the cemetery to visit Dorothy. No reason, he shrugs.

A few days after Dorothy's story ran in The Times, a knock came on Ed's door. Kathy Moore, a former daughter-in-law, wanted to check on him. Moore has been a part of his life ever since, visiting him nearly daily, refilling his medications and spirits, always asking, "Pop, are you OK today?"

Ed typically replies, "I'm still kicking" or "Couldn't be better."

A couple weeks back, Moore and Ed's daughter, Sharon Creekmore, found a live-in aide for Ed.

She follows behind Ed as he s-l-o-w-l-y walks through his home. She makes soup from scratch. She even enjoys country music.

"She's a good ol' gal," said Ed, high praise from this Tennessee hillbilly.

Strangely enough, she's also from Lithuania, just like Dorothy.

Just days before her death, while lingering in a hospice bed, Dorothy whispered one of her last prayers. It was, of course, for Ed. "Lord, please take care of ..."

Ed, who believes Dorothy and Jesus will have to wait awhile longer, is being taken care of just fine.

"And how," he said.

Read more of my earlier columns on my Chicago Tribune webpage, here: https://www.chicagotribune.com/suburbs/chi-jerry-davich-staff.html