Page 200 - In Five Years

Chapter Forty

It happens on Thursday. I am asleep. Aaron is on the couch. Jill and the nurse are
beside her. Those impossibly long, gruesome final moments—I miss them. I am
in the apartment twenty feet away, not by her side. By the time I am awake, she

is gone.
Jill plans the funeral. Frederick flies in. They obsess about the flowers.
Frederick wants a cathedral. An eight-piece orchestra. Where do you find a full

gospel choir in Manhattan?
“This isn’t right,” Aaron says. We are in her apartment, late at night, two days
after she has left us. We are drinking wine. Too much wine. I haven’t been sober

in forty-eight hours. “This isn’t what she would want.” He means the funeral, I
think, although maybe he doesn’t. Maybe he means the whole thing. He would
be right.

“So we should plan what she would,” I say, deciding for him. “Let’s throw
our own.”

“Celebration of life?”
I stick my tongue out at the word. I don’t want to celebrate. This is all unfair.
This is all not what should have been.
But Bella loved her life, every last moment of it. She loved the way she lived

it. She loved her art and her travel and her croque monsieur. She loved Paris for
the weekend and Morocco for the week and Long Island at sunset. She loved her

friends; she loved them gathered; she loved running around the room, topping up
glasses, and making everyone promise to stay long into the night. She would
want this.
“Yes,” I say. “Okay.”

“Where?”