Sequins

     The jacket is black and covered with sequins, very striking and quite expensive, bought on the shopping channel early in the year, when she had high hopes of attending David's wedding, scheduled at first for the fall.  Her health began to fail in early spring, and she was glad at first that the wedding was re-scheduled for May.  "I should be able to make that date," she said, and so we went shopping for her to get a top to wear under the sequined jacket.  Oblivion, combined no doubt with denial, set in as far as I was concerned, because I really had no thought that day would be our final shopping trip,  not after the hundreds and hundreds of shopping days that had gone before, not even though I'd had to drive her to the mall, and not even when at what was to be our final lunch, she told me she had lost her appetite.  I drove her home that day, after the uneaten lunch, with the three tops that she planned to try on later with the sequined jacket to see which one was the best match.  (I later found those 3 tops still in the bag at the top of the stairs outside her bedroom door, never to have been tried on.)
     Not long after that, on a beautiful and horrible spring day, she told me she would not be going to the wedding in May; she feared she would get sick there, and spoil the occasion.  We decided to video her reading the passage she would have read at the wedding, and send it out to Boston for the wedding day. She agreed and wore the sequined jacket, but with a favorite top she already owned, finding it the most suitable after all, she said.  We have the video, with her standing on her beloved sunlit deck, laughing and joking with Dave, and rendering a flawless reading of the Psalm. 
     Dave gave her a copy of the video.  After the wedding, I asked her if she'd viewed it and she said no, she couldn't.  "Maybe later," she added. 
I have the video in my house, somewhere.  Maybe later I'll look at it again, but I probably won't.  The jacket is in my house, somewhere. I thought of wearing it to Daniel's wedding, in her honor, but I couldn't. Either.