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She lay awake in her bed at the hospice, staring at the digital photo frame on her bedside table. With the flick of her eyes, the display would cycle through the pictures stored in it: her wife, young, beautiful, and strong. Their wedding, both of them in white, their families at their sides, committing themselves to a promise neither of them would ever break. Their two beautiful daughters, a wedding gift from the mad geneticist DNAmy. Their daughters' weddings. Their five grandchildren. Their great grandchildren. Her wife's last day, sick and weak. She rarely looked at that last one. It made her sad to remember her wife that way.
Before breakfast the nurse came in to check on her. She liked the nurse. She was friendly without being overly chatty. Nice ass, too. Though she didn't let her eyes linger too much. The ghost didn't like it when she stared. Jealous, most likely.
The ghost had been there, in the corner of her vision, since the day her wife died. When she drifted from waking to sleep, the ghost would shift from a vaguely humanoid form to something almost familiar. Sometimes she could feel her wife's arms around her as she slept. On those nights she would sometimes awake to see the ghost at the foot of her bed; tiny, pale white dots where the ghost's eyes would be, looking at her with a love she could feel.
No one else had ever seen the ghost. She had stopped talking to her family about it. The topic scared her daughters. The nurses would just smile in that way people did when they didn't believe you but didn't want to offend you by telling you so. So, she had long ago stopped talking about the ghost. But it was always there.
She hadn't expected to live this long. Eighty-one years was a long time for someone in her line of work. She'd expected to die on a mission, blown to bits by some lunatic mad scientist, or hit with a death ray, or dropped into a shark tank. She had often envisioned her wife going on a scorched earth rampage to avenge her death, burning the villains' lair to the ground with the madman trapped inside of it. Or maybe, in some weirdly romantic way, the two of them going out together. Not the way she lost her wife.
Who would have thought that a mere disease would take her wife away? Wasting her body, sapping her strength, erasing her mind. She has always assumed it would take an atomic bomb to kill her wife. But a disease? A microbe? An insignificant bacterium? The insult had been too much to bear.
Watching her beautiful, strong wife wither like that had broken her heart. Day after day, sitting by her side, holding her hand, feeling the strength fade, watching her mind slip away until her wife no longer knew her name, only that she loved her. She had forced herself to attend the funeral. She didn't want to be there. She didn't want to accept the truth. But she had to. She had held we wife's hands when she succumbed and the life faded from her eyes. Twenty-two years on and she still hadn't recovered from that loss. She still felt the cold stone in her chest, the empty void where her heart had been.
Tears pooled at the corners of her eyes, threatening to run down her face. The room had gone fuzzy, distorted, and out of focus, save for the picture frame and the ghost. The ghost now stood behind the nurse. It had never been this close before. She knew it was looking down at her and smiling. She couldn't see its face, but she felt it in her bones. And she knew why.
"It is time?" she asked the ghost, the first words she'd spoken in days.
"Time for what?" the nurse's kind voice said from far away.
The ghost nodded.
She closed her eyes and surrendered. Then she was standing next to the bed, looking down on her withered, cooling body. The nurse calmly checked her pulse before noting the time and date on her tablet. Then the nurse pulled the sheet up over her face and left to get the doctor to officiate her time of death.
She turned to the ghost. The vague form was gone; in its stead stood her wife, as she remembered her: young, beautiful, and strong. Without a word, they embraced. The void in her heart filled with the love she thought she'd never feel again. The pain and guilt faded as she buried her face in her wife's resplendent red hair.