“Nick,” she said, and smiled. She clasped one of his hands in both of hers. “I wanted to thank you again. No one wants to die all alone, do they?”

He shook his head violently, and she understood that this was not in agreement with her statement but rather in vehement contradiction of its premise.

“Yes I am,” she contradicted. “But never mind. There’s a dress in that closet, Nick. A white one. You’ll know it because of…” A fit of coughing interrupted her. When she had it under control, she finished, “…because of the lace. It’s the one I wore on the train when we left for our honeymoon. It still fits…or did. I suppose it will be a little big on me now–I’ve lost some weight–but it doesn’t really matter. I’ve always loved that dress. John and I went to Lanke Pontchartrain. It was the happiest two weeks of my life. John always made me happy. Will you remember the dress, Nick? It’s the one I want to be buried in. You wouldn’t be too embarrassed to…to dress me, would you?”

He swallowed hard and shook his head, looking at the coverlet. She must have sensed his mixture of sadness and discomfort, because she didn’t mention the dress again. She talked of other things instead–lightly, almost coquettishly. How she had won an elocution contest in high school, had gone on to the Arkansas state finals, and how her half-slip had fallen down and puddled around her shoes just as she reached the ringing climax of Shirley Jackson’s “The Daemon Lover.” About her sister, who had gone to Viet Nam as part of a Baptist mission group, and had come back with not one or two but three adopted children. About a camping trip she and John had taken three years ago, and how an ill-tempered moose in rut had forced them up a tree and kept them there all day.

“So we sat up there and spooned,” she said sleepily, “like a couple of high school kids in a balcony. My goodness, he was in a state when we got down. He was…we were…in love…very much in love…love is what moves the world, I’ve always thought…it is the only thing which allows men and women to stand in a world where gravity always seems to want to pull them down…bring them low…and make them crawl…we were…so much in love…”

She drowsed off and slept until he wakened her into fresh delirium by moving a curtain or perhaps just by treading on a squeaky board.

“John!” she screamed now, her voice choked with phlegm. “Oh, John, I’ll never get the hang of this dad-ratted stick shift! John, you got to help me! You got to help me…”

Her words trailed off in a long, rattling exhalation he could not hear but sensed all the same. A thin trickle of dark blood issued from one nostril. She fell back on the pillow, and her head snapped back and forth once, twice, there times, as if she had made some kind of vital decision and the answer was negative.

Then she was still.

–Stephen King, The Stand

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