The Rocking Chair Keeps a Rhythm We Didn't Start

We bought the rocking chair at the estate sale of a woman who had lived to a hundred and one and died, per the neighbours who ran the sale, in that very chair, peacefully, one evening, rocking. That fact was volunteered cheerfully, the way estate-sale people volunteer such things, and we bought the chair anyway because it was beautiful — a proper old spindle-back rocker, worn to satin on the arms by a century of a woman's hands.

It rocks by itself. I'll get that out of the way, because it's the least strange part once you know the rest. Gently — never a violent haunted-house rock, just a slow, small, patient motion, the arc of a chair a resting person keeps going with the barest push of a toe. Only in the evenings, roughly the hour she died. And only, we came to realise, at one specific unvarying pace.

It was my wife, a former cardiac nurse, who identified the pace, and identifying it is the thing I can't shake. She sat watching it one evening, counting under her breath the way nurses count, and went pale, and said: 'That's a heartbeat. That's a slow one. That's—' and stopped. The chair rocks at roughly forty beats per minute. A slow resting heart rate. And over the months, my wife swears — and she has the professional ear for it that I lack — the pace has been very gradually slowing. Forty. Then high thirties. The unhurried deceleration, she says, of a heart winding down over a long, long time. The chair is keeping the rhythm of a heartbeat that is still, slowly, decades after it stopped, coming to rest.