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.

We are not frightened of it, which even we find strange. There is nothing menacing in it — quite the opposite. It is the gentlest thing in our house. A very old woman died content in that chair, rocking, her heart slowing, and something of that final peaceful rhythm stayed in the wood, and the chair goes on keeping it, winding down toward a stillness it hasn't quite reached. My wife, who has sat with more dying hearts than anyone should, finds it oddly comforting — 'a good death,' she says, 'on a loop.'

We've decided to let it finish. My wife thinks — and she would know — that when the rocking finally slows to nothing, when the pace reaches the flat calm of a heart fully at rest, the chair will simply stop, its long farewell complete, and be an ordinary chair. She estimates, from the rate of slowing, that we have a few years left of evenings. So we sit with it. We let the old woman's heart finish its rocking. And when it stops, we'll know she's finally, fully, gently gone, a hundred-and-some years after she started, and we'll say goodnight, and mean it.