At 80, My Belly Swelled So Big My Son Rushed Me to the Hospital — Then the Doctor Pulled Up a File From 2014 With My Late Husband's Name on It
Chapter 1: The Question
"Hettie. Can I ask you something?"
My daughter-in-law said it on a Sunday afternoon in October, in my own living room, with a plate of my lemon bars balanced on her knee and the Packers game muttering on the television nobody was watching.
Corinne is fifty-two. She married my Lyle in 1998, in a borrowed church with a ceiling fan that squeaked through the vows. In all the years since, she has asked me about recipes, about Lyle as a boy, about whether a wool coat could go in the dryer. She had never once asked me a direct question about my body.
"Ask away, honey."
Her eyes went to my middle. And she didn't pretend they hadn't.
"Have you shown that to anybody?"
I laughed, the way you laugh when somebody points at a stain you already know is there. "Corinne, I'm eighty. Nothing's where I left it."
She didn't laugh back. She just set the plate on the coffee table, very carefully, like it might break, and kept looking at me. That was what stopped me. Corinne laughs at everything. She laughed at her own wedding when the ring fell down the heating vent.
"Promise me," she said quietly.
"I promise," I said. And I meant it the way you mean it when you want a conversation to be over.
My name is Henrietta Bosworth. People have called me Hettie since about 1952, when my little sister Opal couldn't manage the whole thing and it stuck. I'm eighty years old. I have three children, seven grandchildren, four great-grandchildren, and a two-story house on Tillery Street in Hobart's Ferry that I've lived in since 1971, when the maple out front was the size of a broom handle.
I thought there was very little left that could take me by surprise.
My husband Ansel passed in November of 2014. He was seventy-six. We'd been married fifty years and two months, and I still set out two coffee cups some mornings before my hands remember. His reading glasses are on the rolltop desk in the front room, folded the way he left them. I dust around them.
After he went, everyone told me to sell. Too many stairs, too much yard, too many rooms with nobody in them. I'm contrary, so I stayed.
Then, about six months ago, something started happening to me.
At first it was only that my waistband felt tight. I'm eighty. That's where you put everything at eighty. I let out the elastic on two skirts and thought nothing of it.
Then my good gray slacks, the ones I wore to my great-granddaughter's christening, wouldn't fasten at all. Then none of them would. I stood in front of the closet mirror one morning in June and turned sideways, and I did what I have done my whole life with anything frightening. I closed the closet door.
By August I'd gone over to loose housedresses entirely, the kind with snaps down the front, because my middle had grown so much nothing else would go around it. My neighbor Dot Pruitt asked if I'd been enjoying the church potlucks. I said yes. It was easier.
By fall I couldn't bend to the bottom rack of my oven. I couldn't settle into Ansel's old recliner, which I'd taken over the way you take over a dead man's side of the bed. I was sleeping propped up on four pillows like a queen in a painting, because lying flat felt like a sack of wet sand was sitting on my lungs.
I told myself it was my age about four hundred times. I said it out loud sometimes, to the kettle.
I promised Corinne I'd get it looked at. I didn't.
Three nights after that Sunday, I woke at about two in the morning with a pressure in my belly I had never felt in my life. Not even carrying Lyle, who was nine pounds and stubborn about it.
And then something moved.
That's the only way I can say it. A shift, then a slow sinking, then a heaviness that wouldn't let me lie on either side, as if something inside me had rolled over in its sleep.
I put my hand flat on my stomach.
It moved again. Right there, under my own palm.
I lay in that dark bedroom, eighty years old, listening to the furnace tick, and I was properly frightened for the first time since the night Opal d!ed.
At first light I called my youngest.
"Mom? What's happened?"
"Lyle. Could you drive me up to the hospital? I think it's time I found out what this is."
He was at my door in nineteen minutes. I know because I watched the clock on the stove the whole time.
When I opened the door and he saw me standing in the hall in my blue bathrobe, one hand on the wall, I watched my fifty-six-year-old son's face do something I hadn't seen it do since he was a boy who'd lost me in a department store.
"Mom. Why didn't you tell me it had gotten like this?"
"I didn't want anybody making a fuss."
He put his big hand on my shoulder, and his voice went rough.
"Mom. That's the whole job."
I didn't know yet that I'd heard those words before. Or who had said them first.
Chapter 2: Eleven Minutes
St. Brennan's Regional sits on the hill above the river, and Lyle drove there like the road was made of eggshells. Every pothole, he winced. Every red light, he looked over at me.
"I'm not going to break," I told him.
"You don't know that," he said, and then looked sorry he'd said it.
In the emergency department a nurse with purple glasses took my blood pressure and asked how long my stomach had been swollen. I said a while. Lyle said, "Six months," because Corinne had apparently been keeping count. I gave him a look. He gave it right back. He gets that from me.
They sent me down for an ultrasound.
The room was dim and too warm, and the technician, a young woman named Yolanda with a gold cross on a chain, was chatty at first. She asked about my grandkids. She warmed the gel in her hands before she put it on me, which I thought was a kindness. She told me her own grandmother was ninety-one and still drove to bingo.
Then she put the wand on my belly, and she stopped talking.
She moved it slowly across one side. Then the other. Then she went back over the same place, four times, five, pressing a little harder. Click. Click. Click. I could hear the machine saving pictures, one after another, like a camera at a wedding nobody wanted to be at.
I watched her face. Seventy-some years of reading faces, and I knew that one. It was the face Dr. Penrose made in 2014, standing at the foot of Ansel's bed.
"Is everything all right, sweetheart?" I asked.
She smiled, but it was a smile with nothing behind it. "I'm going to have the doctor come take a look. Just sit tight for me, okay?"
She wiped the gel off my stomach with more care than she needed to, pulled my gown down, and went out.
The door clicked shut.
Lyle had been standing in the corner the whole time, trying to make himself small, which is hard when you're six foot two. He came and sat in the plastic chair by the bed. Neither of us said anything. The clock above the sink had a second hand that jerked instead of swept, and I counted it. One minute. Three. Six.
I thought about Opal. She was fifty-four when they found hers, and by then it was everywhere. I'd sat in a room a lot like this one, holding her hand, and she'd said, "Hettie, I knew. I just didn't want to know." I'd been so angry at her for that. I had stood at her grave and been angry.
And here I was. Six months of housedresses and four pillows.
Nine minutes. Ten.
I looked over at my son. He had Ansel's hands, square and freckled. He was turning his wedding ring around and around.
"Is it bad?" I asked him.
He didn't lie to me. That's how I raised him. "I don't know, Mom."
Eleven minutes, and the door opened.
The doctor was a small woman, maybe forty, with her hair pinned up in a pencil and tired, steady eyes. She introduced herself as Dr. Felicity Quan, and she pulled a stool right up to the bed so we were eye to eye. I liked her for that.
"Mrs. Bosworth, I'm going to be honest with you, because I think you'd want that."
"I would."
"There's a very large mass in your abdomen. Most likely it's coming from your left ovary. It's mostly filled with fluid, which is why it's gotten so big without hurting you more than it has. That movement you felt the other night was probably the fluid shifting when you turned over."
Lyle let out a breath that shook.
"Is it cancer?" I said it plainly, because somebody had to.
"We don't know yet. We need a CT scan and some blood work. Some of these are completely benign, even very big ones. I don't want you to assume the worst." She paused. "But it will have to come out. It's pressing on everything."
I nodded. My mouth had gone dry as flour.
Dr. Quan glanced at the tablet in her lap, and something in her face changed. Not frightened. Puzzled.
"There's something else I need to ask you about. When we pulled up your records, we found a CT scan of your abdomen from September of 2014."
"The kidney stone," I said slowly. "I went in with my side hurting. They gave me a pill and sent me home."
"Yes. And on that scan, the radiologist noticed a small cyst on your left ovary. About three centimeters. The recommendation was a follow-up scan in six months."
I stared at her.
"Nobody ever told me that."
Dr. Quan looked down at her screen for a long moment. Then she turned the tablet toward me.
"There's a phone note in your file from that October," she said gently. "It has your husband's name on it."
Chapter 3: What He Asked Them
I had to ask Lyle for my reading glasses. My hands weren't steady enough to find them in my purse.
The note was short and typed in that flat hospital way, all abbreviations and no feeling. But I read it three times, and by the third time I could hear every word in Ansel's voice.
Oct 14, 2014. Called home re: incidental finding on 9/22 CT. Pt's husband, Ansel Bosworth, answered. Husband reports he is on home hospice, end-stage heart failure, and pt is his full-time caregiver. Husband requests results letter be held until after the holidays. Quote: "She has enough to be scared of right now. I'll tell her myself when she's not frightened for me." Advised finding is low concern at this size. Follow-up ultrasound scheduled March 2015. — R. Tolliver, RN.
And below it, one more line, from the following spring:
3/18/2015. Pt did not attend. Reminder letter mailed.
The room went very quiet. Even the machine seemed to hold its breath.
"Mom?" Lyle said.
I couldn't answer him. I was back in October of 2014.
The hospital bed was in the front room then, where the dining table used to be, so Ansel could see the maple turning out the window. He'd stopped being able to manage the stairs in August. I slept on the couch beside him so I could hear his breathing change. I measured his pills into the little Monday-to-Sunday box. I learned how to work the oxygen. I learned how to change a bed with a grown man in it.
And I remember the phone ringing one afternoon while I was in the kitchen, scrubbing a pot I'd already scrubbed. I remember Ansel answering it on the side table, because he liked to feel useful. I remember him saying, "Yes, ma'am," and "No, that's fine," and "Thank you, I'll handle it."
When I came in drying my hands, I asked who it was.
"Pharmacy," he said. "Nothing for you to worry about, Het."
And then he'd asked me for a notebook. A plain spiral one from the junk drawer, and a pen. He said he wanted to write some things down while he still could. I thought it was a list of hymns for the funeral. I didn't ask. I couldn't bear to.
He wrote in it every day after that, a line or two at a time, slow, his hand shaking. When I came near, he'd close it and grin at me like a kid hiding a frog.
"You old fool," I whispered now, in that warm dim room, with the gel drying sticky on my skin. "You stubborn old fool."
Lyle took the tablet from me and read it. I watched his jaw work.
"He was d!ing," he said, "and he was worried about you."
"He was always worried about me. Fifty years. If I sneezed, he went for the Vicks."
"Why didn't you go in March, Mom?"
I opened my mouth to say I never got any letter, and then I closed it again. Because March of 2015 is mostly a blank to me. I remember the snow didn't melt. I remember I stopped answering the phone. I remember the mail piling up on the hall table until Nell came over and swept it all into a laundry basket so it would stop falling on the floor. I don't remember opening a single envelope that whole winter. Every one of them was sympathy or a bill with his name on it, and I couldn't.
"I don't know," I said. That was true enough.
Dr. Quan stood. "I'm going to get you in for the CT this afternoon. I'm sorry this is all coming at once."
The scan took twenty minutes. The waiting took four hours. Corinne came after her shift at the credit union, still in her lanyard, and didn't say I told you so, which I'll never forget. She just sat on my other side and held my hand with both of hers.
At six o'clock a new doctor came in, tall and gray-bearded, with a voice like a radio announcer. Dr. Lionel Achterberg, gynecologic surgery.
He put the CT images up on a screen, and I finally saw it. A great pale shape filling me up from my hipbones nearly to my ribs, shoving everything else aside like furniture pushed to the walls for a dance.
"That's in me?" I said.
"That's in you," he said kindly. "It's large. The good news is it looks contained, and nothing on the scan suggests it's spread. But I can't promise what it is until it's out and under a microscope."
"And taking it out?"
He sat on the edge of the counter and folded his hands.
"Mrs. Bosworth, you're eighty. This is major surgery. There are real risks with the anesthesia, with your heart, with recovery. Some patients your age decide they'd rather not."
"And if I don't?"
"It will keep growing. And eventually it will make that decision for you."
He let that sit. Then he said, "I won't decide this for you. Talk to your family. But I'd like an answer by Friday."
Chapter 4: The Kitchen Table
They all came to Tillery Street that Wednesday night, the way they used to come for Ansel's birthday.
My oldest, Rosalind, drove four hours from Clement Bay with her hair still wet from the shower she took before she left. My middle girl, Nell, brought a pot of chili nobody ate. Lyle and Corinne came straight from work. We sat around my kitchen table, the oak one Ansel refinished in 1983 with a rag and a lot of swearing, and nobody touched the cornbread.
Rosalind spoke first, because she always does.
"Mom, I've been reading all day. At eighty, the complication rates for abdominal surgery are—"
"Ros," Nell said.
"I'm just saying we need to look at it with clear eyes. If it's benign, maybe we manage it. Drain it. There are options."
"The surgeon didn't say there were options," Lyle said. "He said it keeps growing."
"Surgeons always want to operate."
"Oh, for heaven's sake," Nell said, and pushed her chair back so hard it squealed. "She can't sleep lying down, Ros. She can't bend over. You haven't seen her since the Fourth of July. You don't know."
That landed. Rosalind's face crumpled for just a second before she got it under control. She lives far away, and she carries it like a stone in her shoe.
I sat there with my hands folded on the rise of my belly and listened to my children argue about whether I should be cut open. I thought about how many times I'd sat at this table and refereed them, over the last pork chop, over who broke the porch light, over who had to call Grandma. Now I was the porch light.
And underneath it, the whole time, a small mean voice I'd been hearing since the hospital: Ansel kept it from you. He decided for you. I'd been angry at him for two days and ashamed of being angry for two days, and the two feelings sat on each other like stacked plates.
Corinne hadn't said a word. She was shredding a paper napkin into neat little strips.
"Corinne," I said. "You noticed first. What do you think?"
She looked up, startled. She's always been careful in this family, the married-in one, the one who brings store-bought pie and apologizes for it.
"It's not my place, Hettie."
"I'm asking you."
She put the napkin down. Her chin trembled.
"I noticed in June," she said. "At the picnic. You reached for the potato salad and you held your side, and your dress pulled across your stomach, and I—" She swallowed. "My mom had the same shape. Before. I knew that shape. And I didn't say anything for four months because I didn't want you thinking I was being nosy. Because I wanted you to like me." She laughed, wet. "Twenty-eight years and I still want you to like me."
Nobody spoke. Rosalind reached over and put a hand on Corinne's arm.
"I've liked you since the ring went down the heating vent," I told her. "Honey, you're the only one at this table who asked me a straight question."
She cried then, and so did Nell, and Lyle got up and stood at the sink with his back to us, which is how the Bosworth men cry.
When it was quiet again, I said, "I'm going to have it out."
Rosalind opened her mouth.
"Ros. I know the numbers. I'm not a fool, whatever your father thought." I looked at the window over the sink, black now, with my own reflection in it, a round old woman in a snap-front housedress. "Your daddy spent his last weeks on this earth trying to keep me from being scared. He was wrong to do it that way. But he did it because he loved me. I'm not going to waste that by being too scared now to do the one thing that might keep me here."
Rosalind nodded slowly. Then she got up, came around the table, and put her arms around me from behind, her wet hair against my cheek.
"Okay, Mama," she whispered. "Okay."
Surgery was scheduled for Monday.
The night before, after they'd all gone home, I couldn't sleep, so I went down to the front room in the dark. I sat in Ansel's recliner, as best I could, and looked at the rolltop desk.
I hadn't opened it since the spring of 2015. I'd locked it one night and dropped the little brass key somewhere and told myself I'd find it when I was ready.
His reading glasses sat folded on top, catching the streetlight.
"I'm going in tomorrow," I told them. "You'd better be pulling for me."
The house ticked and settled. And for a long time I sat there wondering what else was behind that rolltop, and why it suddenly mattered so much that I know.
Chapter 5: The Longest Morning
They told me to be at St. Brennan's by five-thirty in the morning, and I was ready at four, sitting in the hall with my overnight bag on my knees like a girl waiting for a school bus.
Corinne came in with Lyle and braided my hair. I hadn't asked. She just stood behind my chair in the pre-op room with a comb and a hair tie and said, "You won't want it in your face after," and her fingers were gentle and quick. I closed my eyes. The last person who'd braided my hair was my mother, and she'd pulled.
The gown was the kind that ties in the back and doesn't. A nurse with a Southern accent put an IV in the back of my hand and called me "Miss Hettie" and asked me to state my name, my birthday, and what we were doing today.
"Henrietta Rose Bosworth. April ninth, 1946. You're taking out whatever's been renting space in my belly."
She laughed so hard she had to steady herself on the bed rail.
Dr. Achterberg came by in his blue cap and marked a little X on my skin with a purple pen. He held my hand a moment.
"You ready?"
"No," I said. "But I've never been ready for one blessed thing in my life, and I've done most of them anyway."
The anesthesiologist was a young man with a ponytail and very clean fingernails. He explained everything, and I didn't hear a word of it. I was looking past him at Lyle in the doorway, his hands jammed in his jacket pockets, trying to smile.
"Mom," he said. "We'll be right here."
"I know you will."
He came over and kissed my forehead, which he has not done since he was in Little League. And then they wheeled me down a hallway of ceiling lights, one after another, like the dashes on a highway at night.
The operating room was cold and bright and full of people in masks talking about the weekend. Somebody put something over my face and told me to breathe slow.
I remember thinking about my wedding. June of 1964, the VFW hall out on Dutton Road, a three-piece band that only knew five songs. Ansel couldn't dance worth a nickel. He stepped on my feet through "Moon River" twice, and the second time he leaned down and said, "Het, I'm going to spend fifty years stepping on you, and you're going to let me." And I said, "We'll see."
Then nothing.
Then a voice, from very far down a well.
"Mrs. Bosworth. Henrietta. Can you open your eyes for me?"
My throat felt scraped raw. Everything was blurred and too white. A machine beeped steady beside my ear, and I followed the sound back up like a rope.
Dr. Achterberg was standing over me with his cap off. His hair was flattened. He looked tired and, I thought, pleased.
"It's out," he said. "All of it. We got it out in one piece, which is what we wanted."
I tried to speak. A nurse gave me ice chips on a spoon.
"How big?" I croaked.
He hesitated, the way doctors do when a number is going to sound unreal.
"Thirty-one pounds."
I just lay there. Thirty-one pounds. More than a Thanksgiving turkey. More than my great-grandson Teddy weighed on his second birthday. I had carried that around my kitchen for six months and called it age.
"The early look under the microscope during surgery was reassuring," he went on. "It looks benign. But I don't promise anything until final pathology comes back. That takes a few days."
"A few days," I repeated.
"Rest. Your heart did beautifully. You did beautifully."
They let Lyle and Corinne in after an hour. Lyle stopped at the foot of the bed and looked at me, really looked, at the blanket lying flat across my middle for the first time since spring. He put a hand over his mouth.
"Mom," he said through his fingers. "You look like you."
I reached down slowly, under the blanket, and laid my palm on my stomach. It was bandaged and sore and flat as a pie tin. Nothing shifted. Nothing settled. Nothing rolled over in its sleep.
I started to cry, and it hurt my stitches, and I didn't care.
Corinne pulled the chair close and smoothed the braid she'd made. "It held," she said. "The braid held."
Rosalind and Nell came in the evening with a balloon that said IT'S A BOY, which was the only one left in the gift shop, and we laughed until the nurse shushed us.
But late that night, after they'd gone and the hallway lights had dimmed, I lay awake listening to the monitor and thinking about that word Dr. Achterberg had used.
Final.
Final pathology. A few days.
I had waited six months not to know. Now I had to wait three more days to find out whether I'd waited too long.
Chapter 6: What Ansel Kept
The call came on Thursday, while Nell was helping me shuffle laps around the nurses' station with a walker that had tennis balls on its feet.
Dr. Achterberg met us in my room. He didn't sit on the counter this time. He sat on the bed, right by my knee.
"Mucinous cystadenoma," he said. "Benign. No cancer anywhere in it. Nothing in the fluid, nothing in the lymph nodes we checked." He smiled, finally, all the way. "You're done with it, Hettie. You don't need anything else from me but a follow-up visit."
Nell made a sound like a teakettle and sat down hard on the visitor's chair. I just held on to the walker and let the words sink in, one at a time, like stones into a pond.
"If I'd come in back in 2015," I said slowly. "When it was little."
He nodded. "It would've been a small procedure. Maybe just watching it. But I'll tell you something. Plenty of people never come in at all. You came in."
I went home to Tillery Street the following Tuesday. Lyle carried my bag and Corinne carried the IT'S A BOY balloon, which by then was hanging at half-mast. The maple out front had dropped nearly everything, and the yard was a sea of red.
That evening, Corinne found the key.
She'd been hanging my coats in the hall closet, and she checked the pockets of Ansel's old brown barn coat out of habit, the one I'd never been able to give away. The little brass key was in the left pocket with a cough drop and a 2014 receipt for birdseed. I must have tucked it there the night I locked the desk, and then forgotten, the way you forget on purpose.
She held it out to me on her open palm. "Hettie? Do you want me to leave it?"
"No," I said. "Lyle, come sit with me."
He turned the key, and the rolltop rattled up for the first time in eleven years. The smell came out first. Pipe tobacco and Ansel's aftershave and old paper.
The laundry basket of mail was jammed in under the cubbyholes, right where I'd shoved it in April of 2015. Sympathy cards, still sealed. Electric bills. A seed catalog. And there, halfway down, a white envelope from St. Brennan's Regional, addressed to Mrs. Henrietta Bosworth, postmarked March 2015.
Never opened.
I held it in my lap and didn't open it now either. I didn't need to. I knew what it said. What I didn't know was what was in the spiral notebook lying underneath it, its cover soft from handling, THINGS TO TELL HET printed across the front in his square carpenter's capitals.
My hands shook. Lyle read it to me.
Furnace filter is 16 x 25. Buy them at Sorensen's, not the big store.
Christmas ornaments are in the attic, behind the train set. The angel's wing is glued. Don't let the grandkids handle her.
She was right about the Studebaker. Tell her I said so. She'll like that.
Tell Lyle to check her tires every winter. She won't.
The lines went on for pages, the handwriting getting shakier and smaller. The last entry was nearly at the bottom, the pen dragging so badly you could see where he'd had to stop and rest between words.
The scan. Nurse says the little cyst is nothing to fret about yet but needs looking at in March. Didn't tell her. She'd have stopped taking care of me to go and she'd have been terrified for both of us at once. Lyle — make her go. Drive her yourself. Don't take no for an answer. Getting her there is the whole job.
Lyle stopped reading. His voice had broken on the last line and didn't come back.
The whole job.
I'd heard those words in my own front hall, at seven in the morning, from my son. He'd never seen this notebook. He'd just grown up with a father who said it about everything. Shoveling my steps, warming the car, carrying my groceries. That's the whole job, Het.
Ansel had d!ed eight days after that last entry. He'd run out of time to hand it off. And I'd buried the notebook and the letter both, in a basket, in a locked desk, because I couldn't stand to open anything with his love in it.
"He tried," I whispered. "Oh, Ansel. You stubborn, stubborn man. You tried."
Lyle got down on his knees by the recliner and put his head against my arm, and we stayed like that a long time, the open desk breathing tobacco into the room, while Corinne stood in the doorway with her hand pressed flat against her heart.
Epilogue
By April the maple had leafed out again, and I could bend to the bottom rack of my oven.
That was the first thing I did when Dr. Achterberg cleared me. Not a walk or a drive. I baked a pan of lemon bars and bent all the way down to pull them out, slow, one hand on the counter, and I stood up again without a sound. Then I stood in my kitchen and cried over a pan of lemon bars like a fool, and it was one of the best mornings of my life.
My good gray slacks fasten now. I wore them to Teddy's third birthday party, and Rosalind made me turn around in the yard like a model while Nell whistled through her fingers.
The rolltop stays open these days. I bought furnace filters at Sorensen's, the 16 by 25. I told Rosalind she was right about her own car, which she enjoyed tremendously. The glued angel will go on top of the tree in December, and no grandchild will touch her.
On a Sunday afternoon in late April, Corinne came by with a store-bought pie and apologized for it, and we sat in the front room with coffee and the window cracked to let the spring in.
I watched her for a while. She'd been rubbing her shoulder all afternoon and pretending she wasn't.
"Corinne," I said. "Can I ask you something?"
She looked up, and something passed over her face. She knew those words. She'd said them to me in this very room, and they'd saved my life.
"Go on," she said carefully.
"That shoulder. Have you shown it to anybody?"
She laughed. "Hettie, I'm fifty-three. Nothing's where it was."
I didn't laugh back. I just looked at her and waited, the way she'd waited for me.
She put down her fork.
"Monday," she said quietly. "I'll call Monday."
"I'll drive you," I said. "That's the whole job."
That night, after she'd gone, I sat down at Ansel's desk and put on his reading glasses, which are too strong for me and make the whole world swim. I opened the spiral notebook to the last page, under his shaking handwriting, and I picked up a pen.
May you like
Went. — H.
Then I closed the notebook, turned off the lamp, and went up the stairs to bed, where I slept flat on my back on one pillow, the way I used to sleep beside him, all the way through to morning.
