In the Quiet After
It is not length of life, but depth of life — Ralph Waldo Emerson
Editor’s Note: An excerpt from Hannah Warry-Smith’s novella, which explores the intersection of love, loss, and the complex grief of letting go on someone else’s terms.—David Michael Slater
A Spell to Make You Stay
Tom Thomson, View From a Height, Algonquin Park'
“I know you to the bone through an incantation that comes from me to you. To scatter oneself wildly and yet behind everything pulses an inflexible geometry.”
— Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star
Alice once saw two moose from this vantage point. It had been winter when she and Gene had last hiked this path. She had seen the movement and pulled him towards the cliff edge to get a better look. The moose were down in the valley, distant shapes with hardly any indication of how staggering their size is up close. They were rubbing their antlers against tree bark, trying to set themselves free. Alice and Gene had waited there until the moose both shook themselves back into life and ambled back into the brush. She thinks Gene was probably grateful for the break – they had to stop several times for him to catch his breath, but he insisted they keep going. He had admitted in the end—when they’d seen the view of the pines dotted with clearings, spots where the river showed itself, spilling over rocks and thick brush—that it was worth it.
Now, Alice is here alone, sitting on a mossy bit of rock that gives way to sheer cliff face not ten feet in front of her. She holds her water bottle with both hands and tries to find the same spot where they had seen the moose, focusing on the trees and what she can see in the distance. The feel of the rock underneath her feet grounds her, and she holds the water bottle like it is all that keeps the ground beneath her solid. She wonders if the tree down there in the valley somewhere still shows signs of the antlers rubbing and breaking against it, or if the bark has already healed. She is trying to just look and not think too much. Trying to step outside of herself.
Gene had come to her with his proposal three weeks ago, but the revelations of that day had placed them both in a space where time no longer felt tangible. Alice felt as if the past weeks had been simultaneously stretched to the length of their entire forty-two years together and twisted into only a matter of hours. He had sat her down at their chestnut dining table next to the window, with the bookshelf packed too full on the opposite wall, the kettle on the stovetop bubbling, and placed a binder down on the table between them. Always formulaic, he began to flip through the pages of typed-out pros and cons lists and calendars filled in with various doctors’ appointments. There were printouts of studies he had researched on the computer in his office, probably at three in the morning when he would often wake, unable to sleep. It had made sense to her—as he talked through the pages, all hole punched and highlighted, colour coded tabs on one side – why the printer had frequently been running low on ink the last few months.
Alice wondered how long he had been compiling this, how long he had kept it from her. He said something about the long-term effects of chronic pain, but it was hard for her to recognise his voice through the low, ominous hum that had begun at the base of her skull.
Alice closes her eyes as a particularly biting wind hits her face. Before the hike, she had driven for over an hour. He had still been sleeping when she left—exactly how she hoped it would be. As she made her coffee in a travel mug and slipped her arms through the sleeves of a wool coat he bought for her three Christmases ago, she looked at the notepad on the counter. He knew she would be gone, and they had said everything they needed to say to each other this last week, after feelings had settled. Still, she felt compelled, found herself standing over the notepad, pen in hand. She wished she were a skilled artist or poet and could leave the perfect thing in ink for him to find when he awoke. Instead, she forced herself to step back and get into the safety of the car. Now, again, she finds herself thinking of the empty notepad, and a rush of regret and worry pools in her mind. She hadn’t meant to come to this specific spot, it was muscle memory that had carried her here. She had just felt the urge to get far away, but in this wave of anxiety, she feels too far. She stands up, but her legs don’t respond as fast as she’d like, and she stumbles, grabbing onto a protruding rock. The moss is soft and dewy under her fingers. The dirt gets under her nails.
Finding out about Gene’s plan had made every detail of that day stick in Alice’s memory, like he had wallpapered every inch of her mind with its intricacies. She can so clearly see the way his hand shook as he handled the paper. His ring, near identical to her own—scratched and worn in the same places, its brilliance dulled with the years—reflecting the light that poured through the veil of their linen curtains. Alice was always pushing the curtains to the side, Gene perpetually clearing his throat; he was trying to read, and the sun was in his eyes. Could she please pull the curtains shut a little? She had just wanted to let in as much light as possible, filling their home with it, bathing his face and hair and arms in a flood of gold. But that day, with the sun on his face as he squinted at the binder on the table and talked about quality of life, she gladly would have lived the rest of her life in the dark, curtains pulled all the way shut, if it meant all would be well again, if it would give them more time.
Deciding to stay on the rocky outcropping, Alice wipes the dirt off her hands and tries to let herself enjoy the warmth of the sun fighting to push through the clouds. Shafts of light descend onto trees and river rocks and all the living things that call them home. It is somehow calming to see it all still moving along, even as she feels the world caving in on top of her. She spots a hawk flying overhead in a ray of sunlight and watches as it glides on the wind, barely moving its wings. She lets herself relax before the hawk dives down with sudden speed, disappearing below the tree line. Alice imagines a rabbit on the forest floor, hidden from the sun by the trees. She thinks of its ears twitching as the air shifts, thinks of the hawk suddenly being upon it. Talons were sharp but not piercing skin yet; maybe the rabbit would be grateful as it soared through the air, finally able to catch a glimpse of the sun. Alice closes her eyes again, imagining the rabbit doing the same. Letting the warmth soak in, feeling that last bit of sun before the inevitable that awaits at the nest.
Gene had been complaining about the pain for some time, which was unlike him. The diagnosis came two years ago on a rare sunny day in Vancouver when they had been in the city for appointments, spending the morning walking around and marvelling at the blue sky, broken up only by the outstretched limbs of mostly bare trees. What few leaves were left, their warm hues bright against the cool sky, drifted to the ground just to be crushed underfoot. She held his hand tightly while doctors spoke, using words like progression and deterioration, and next steps. Words like comfortable and sorry were thrown around a lot, too, and that night, they went to sleep in an unfamiliar hotel bed in silence. The year after that had been hard, but they had taken the opportunity to do lots they had been putting off, and in a strange way, it ended up being one of Alice’s favourite years in recent memory. Genie had celebrated his 73rd birthday with a lopsided cake and the kids and grandkids surrounding him. They had seen a bear on one of their hikes for the first time in both their lives, had travelled to Genie’s hometown, and driven the streets he used to know as a child. But through all of it, he was hiding the near-constant pain he was in. Trying to stay in control of his own body. Looking back, Alice can’t believe she didn’t see it coming when he pulled that binder out three weeks ago. Her first thoughts at the time—that it contained some intricate plan for a surprise getaway, a holiday villa he had surely booked and was about to surprise her with, that’s what all those coloured tabs had to be—only brought a deep-rooted shame thinking back on them. Her naiveté and selfishness shrank her into a small child listening to grown-ups talk about things she simply couldn’t understand.
Alice remembers reading the papers for herself, after he’d gone to bed that night, because she couldn’t focus enough on what he was saying to have any of it make sense. She needed to hold the binder, to feel it, but she had been shaking so much she had to smooth each piece of paper out onto the table with both hands just to read the words. There were studies printed out in pieces across several pages because he had taken them right off the internet, and the ads had come out along with them. Euthanasia laws in different countries and how they worked across provinces sat alongside ads for heated work gloves and linen aprons. She would put the paper down and put her hands on the next as if to feel for a pulse, spreading it over the pockmarked chestnut. Hands pressed firmly with flat palms on worn wood, she stared down at the papers and felt like she couldn’t move, like if she blinked, the spell of existing in this moment and taking this information in would be broken, and she would fall somewhere so deep she wouldn’t be able to get out. Sitting on the rocks now, she looks down at her hands, tracing over the lines and veins, and wonders if that would be such a bad thing.
Alice thinks she would stay sitting on the cliff until her own body gave way to the elements if it meant she could take back the week or so of fighting and bitter silence that had followed that day three weeks ago. Genie had tried to explain to her so many times, as her vision blurred and her ears rang, just how much pain he was in. The illness wasn’t terminal, they both knew that, but he had taken her hands in his and told her that he just couldn’t bear it anymore; the feeling of losing himself to it. His hands had felt like the farthest thing from comfort in that moment, while he, in his matter-of-fact way, the lifelong mathematics scholar in him coming out, explained that he was simply too tired to continue. She had looked back down to the first paper in the open binder—patients had to be terminal to take advantage of the act that had passed through parliament two years ago. Dying with dignity, it was called. She heard him say something about how he’d only come up with this plan because the legal route wasn’t an option, but he sounded a lifetime away from her, and she couldn’t get that phrase out of her head. Dying with dignity. Her head spun with the kind of headache that only comes after crying. Her eyes flickered to the edge of the page. Oven mitts were on sale for fifteen percent off.
She had begged him at first, with a raw throat and pounding headache and a stuffed-up nose, to stay with her. She knew it was selfish, that it wasn’t a fair ask, no matter how rooted in love and pain it was. She was asking him to continue to suffer, but a part of her felt justified in those first few days. What about the times when it had been hard for her? When the marriage was strained and they didn’t talk, and he spent more time at his office in the city than at home? Hadn’t she suffered then, and stuck with it? Hadn’t they found a way forward, stronger, better? Wasn’t this the whole point—they had committed to be in it, through it all. Alice shifts positions, shrugging off the wool coat as the warmth of the sun spreads into her bones. She looks over the valley for another sign of the hawk but can’t spot the movement of wings. She doesn’t know, even now, how he had expected her to react. The person she most trusted, sharing a life and kids and memories with, had sat her down and told her that time was almost up. Except it wasn’t, she had argued at first, not really. He was just twisting the timer closer to zero with his own hands, and she was reaching out to hold him back, to do anything to stop him. She wonders now if he had wanted to ask her to be there but had seen in her face that she wouldn’t have been able to. She looks up at the clouds, swirling together and rushing to some destiny far away that they can’t grasp. If her last gift was allowing him this ending, surely his to her was going quietly. Letting her slip out the door before the timer went off.
On the drive this morning, she saw roadkill that reminded her of their worst fights. It was a large beaver, dead in the middle of the lane, with its guts trailing along another twenty or so feet on the pavement. It wasn’t a common sight, a dead beaver, and everything she sees today feels like an omen anyway. But it was the splattered entrails that moved her to near tears in the car. Their fights were never small, they were always momentous occasions. Neither one was prone to raising their voice, but somehow the combination of the two of them brought out the shouting. Once, years ago, when they had lived closer to the city, Alice had watched him pull out of the driveway after storming out, and she had taken a roast she’d been cooking and let herself drop it onto the floor, the baking dish shattering, juices spilling and pooling around her feet. She’d left it there for him to find when he came home. The fighting always ended the same way, though—collapsing into each other, torn open and exhausted from the race to be the first to pull their heart out for the other to see. Bloody and battered and promising to do better.
She finds herself smiling at the memory of the roast. This past week, when the fighting over the plan had ended, Genie had come home from grocery shopping—an outing Alice had spitefully refused to join and instantly regretted. He found her in the middle of cleaning out the garden shed. The late summer evening air was surprisingly cool, but she was out there in old denim shorts and a ragged tee shirt, work gloves on and grey hair tied up in a bun. She had emptied the whole shed of boxes and tools and was holding the hose as a kind of power washer, spraying the dirt down the sides of the walls in the dark. She dropped it as she heard his voice and rushed over, holding onto him. She knew they had both come to the same conclusion by how he was trembling. This big, beautiful thing they shared was coming to an end. She heard him whisper into her hair that he was so, so sorry, and he wanted more than anything to stay. It was the most vulnerable she had ever heard him be in over forty years. She found clarity through the dryness of her own throat, pulled her head back, and placed her hands on either side of his face. He felt cold, and scared, and she told him that he didn’t have to be sorry, that it was alright—that he could go, and she would love him just the same.
Alice has lost sight of the hawk entirely. Scanning the forest below, she wonders if maybe it has swooped down just to sit on a branch, to get a better view of the ground and all the life it holds. Maybe it already has its meal in its talons and, like her, is just taking a little longer to fly home. Maybe it’s taking the scenic route, under branches so its wings are dappled with light. She smiles, feeling more at ease, thinking of the hawk doing what it must—still hoping to make amends as its talons sink into soft fur and flesh.
Part of her resents the fact that he told her his plan. She’s thought of it every night this past week while staring at the bedroom walls, before drifting into a restless sleep in the early morning hours. She wonders if it would have been easier to just find him, not knowing it was coming. Maybe that would have left her even angrier in the aftermath. She knows she will never stop contemplating what would have been easier, when really, she knows none of it is. She thinks of how she will now spend the rest of her life pretending she didn’t know it was coming. She dreads the calls she will have to make to the kids. She takes a sip from her water bottle and grimaces at how warm it has become sitting on the rock in the sun for however long she has been here. She isn’t sure, but the sun has moved across the sky, so it must be a long time. Should she tell the kids that she knew, or put it in a letter to go with her own will for them to find one day, when she won’t have to deal with it? That’s a selfish thought, too, she thinks, but it is one she has thought of nearly every night. These past few weeks, she has needed to trick herself into thinking things will get easier to find sleep.
Last night over dinner, they had talked about books briefly; she asked Gene a question she never thought she would, which had been if he had a particular passage or author he would like to have read aloud at his service. His expression softened, and she knew the question had pressed itself against his heart. He was quiet for a long time as she watched him think, letting the food grow cold on her plate. They had made it together, cooking in the kitchen while music played from the radio in the other room. The food itself didn’t matter in the end; Gene had said he just wanted a simple roast chicken, something Alice had made for years and years. What mattered more was that the kitchen had been warm and the music just loud enough to hear and far away enough to have that distant sound that made it all the more desirable; like the music was just out of reach, their fingertips grasping to hold it closer, as if it could prolong the moment.
He finally answered her question, after they had cleared all the dishes except for their wine glasses. The waning sun illuminated the air between them, and Alice saw him through a haze of the dust that had collected throughout their life together. He looked like a fading dream, and she reached over to hold his hand to make sure he was really still there. He said if there could be a quote by Marston Morse, that would be perfectly acceptable, and he would like that very much. Alice tried to remember any knowledge that may have existed in her mind at some point, insight into who Marston Morse might be, and why her husband wanted his to be the last word. Genie must have seen the look on her face; Morse was a mathematician, he explained. He kept his books on the easiest to reach shelf from the desk in the office, that’s where she would find them. He said something once about the shared madness of maths and the arts. Genie paused for a minute, finishing his glass of wine. Alice thought she saw the shadow of a tear in his eye, reflected in the light. That quote, he told her, nodding a little. That’s the one.
Looking out over the mountains in the distance, Alice takes a deep breath. She doesn’t want to think of the time, of the fact that it’s probably done, and she should start heading back. She puts one hand flat on the rock and stands up, her legs balking at the request after having been seated for so long. Her feet tingle with a thousand pin pricks that just get worse when she takes a step. She steadies herself, grabbing an outstretched branch from a nearby tree, straightening her back as she surveys the valley again. A flash of movement against the trees catches her eye, and she spots the hawk, finally in sight again. It is much further away now, wings beating against the horizon, and the shape of something clutched in its talons. Alice tries to think back to yesterday, before dinner, when Genie had gone over his plan again, but she feels dizzy and can’t bring herself to remember clearly. She looks toward the sun, pushing lower in the sky. Had he wanted to watch the sunset one last time, or did he want to have his morning coffee and get it over with? The more she wills herself to remember, standing alone on the rock, her fist clutching the branch that is sticky with sap, the more the memory strays from her grasp.
Last night, instead of sleeping, she turned over in bed, thinking about mathematics and art. She watched Genie’s face in the moonlight and listened to the rise and fall of his breath, feeling like some spider had materialised from her own mind and spun silk to make up the lines of his face, the web of their entire togetherness, tracing every laugh and worry and memory. She wondered where all the memories they shared would go when he was gone, whether they would feel too heavy living in her mind alone. She wished that she had been an artist. She would have pulled a sketchbook from the bedside table to draw him, would use the side of a charcoal pencil to get the shadows just right—dotting the stubble and flicking her wrist to get the exact, slight curl of the hairs that fell over his forehead. There would be notebooks full of moments she captured this way, sitting neatly on a shelf. If she were an artist, they would have made the room at the back a studio for the two of them; him writing at his desk and an easel on the diagonal for her to paint, him as her muse who would live forever in her works. Maybe they would have had the radio on in the other room, as she painted him in the evening light that came in from the windows, and he would have been okay with the curtains being pulled to the side. Maybe they could have talked about Marston Morse and how they both related to his musings on life and art. If only she had been an artist. Maybe he would have pulled a book out of the shelf as he was looking for more paper for the printer, and a sketch of him she had done on a napkin would have fallen out. Maybe the beauty of it would have persuaded him to stay, even for just a little longer.
Alice begins the walk back to the car with a few more shaky steps, back turned to the forest and orange-pink hues of the now darkening sky. No matter what his plan had been that she can no longer remember the details of, she has lingered long enough that she will be back after dark, and all will be quiet and done. The timer has gone off, she’s sure of it. She turns back for one last glance at the hawk and its prize, but they are both long gone. Out of her vision and somewhere far beyond the horizon, basking in the last moments of the sun.
Hannah Warry-Smith is a Jewish Canadian writer currently based in Toronto. With a background in art history and the visual arts, she attended Central Saint Martins, UAL, before graduating from OCAD University with an Honours BA in Visual and Critical Studies. Her first thesis delved into the work of Amedeo Modigliani and how Jewish diasporic identity shaped his work, as well as the role of artwork and caricature in the public opinion of the Dreyfus Affair. In 2024, Hannah graduated with an MA in Creative and Life Writing from Goldsmiths, University of London with a First Class Honours. Her dissertation, a novella-length piece, was long-listed for the 2024 Pat Kavanagh Prize in conjunction with Goldsmiths and United Agents. Hannah is interested in storytelling as spell casting, investigating intergenerational trauma and teachings, and exploring the many ways we relate to the world and each other through the stories we tell and the magic we weave.
What five tiny delights lift your spirits and make you happy?
Finding small rocks and pebbles everywhere I go to collect at the bottom of every bag I own
Reading a book on the couch with my dog curled up next to me
A long walk at night after a fresh snowfall
Never getting tired of every little shade of pink and orange and red and purple that makes up a sunset
Laughing with my friends, which is real-life magic.
What five tiny JEWISH delights lift your spirits and make you happy?
Braiding challah every week, no matter how many times I do it, and how it always feels like a gift
Watching my bubbie light the Shabbat candles
Hearing Hebrew or seeing a magen david on someone while travelling, and sharing a smile of connection
Seeing the Negev in every desert landscape I visit, and knowing it lives in my bones.
How a drizzle of honey tastes on a slice of apple or a torn piece of challah on Rosh Hashanah
Such beautiful writing. Thank you.