I did this call as a paramedic. As we entered the back door, stretcher in hand, we saw her - bracketed by the home care nurse and a social worker. She wore a scarf that hooded her face and her long gray hair hung dirty and straight, further indrawing her features. Her tired old dress clung to her as she held the workers on either side for support. The faded, not too clean, bodice of her dress froze agonizingly with each breath.

The caseworker said " She found her husband on the floor last week and tried to lift him up. We think she tore some rib muscles and has developed pneumonia." We started our treatment and as we worked I looked around. Every room was stacked with boxes and old newspapers, the lights were dingy and walls were dirty with soot from the old wood stove in the kitchen. It looked like the house inside had never seen the light of day and indeed through the caregiver's narrative we heard, "They lived here forty years and hardly ever came out."

My thought was, they became each others universe inside these walls. We finished up and took her to the hospital. It wasn't until two weeks later I slipped through my mind into that same kitchen, a week before we actually arrived and I found her kneeling with her dead husband in her arms and she was saying to him -