Tomas Dies in the Hospital

Tomas Dies in the Hospital is a remembered death whose force comes not only from Tomas’s loss but from Cima’s absence at the end. She stays beside her dying mother while Tomas is in the hospital; afterward, uncertainty about what she knew and what she might have done hardens into guilt, returning in a dream she eventually shares with Hig.

Circumstances of the Separation

Early in the pandemic, before the communication networks had gone down, Cima’s friend Joel, a doctor running the hospital wing, called to tell her about Tomas. He had been coughing, but there was no fever, and many people were coughing while only a few cases had been confirmed. Cima was already with her parents in New York City, where her mother was dying. She decided to stay with them, believing Tomas had not yet contracted the illness and expecting to return in a week or two.

The decision is recalled through the limits of what Cima could know at the time. She later judged that, given her work in public health and the first reports reaching her, she should have understood the danger. But the account also preserves the uncertainty she faced: Tomas’s symptoms were not yet clearly distinguishable from those of many others. Her regret grows from that gap between what seemed knowable then and what his death made painfully clear afterward.

Death and Its Aftermath

Tomas died in the hospital calling for Cima and looking around the ward in confusion. Joel offered to cremate him and keep the ashes until Cima could return. She was grateful for this, and planned to spread them at John’s Brook in the mountains near Keene Valley, a place she and Tomas had visited together. The plan is described as an intention, not as an action the narrative confirms she later carried out.

The imagined return home could not undo the absence itself. Cima’s mother needed her, but Tomas, too, had needed her; after his death she asks herself why she stayed and whether she should have known. The competing claims of the two people she loved remain unresolved in her recollection. Her guilt is not presented as proof that she caused his death, but as the burden of having chosen under incomplete information and then learning the outcome she feared too late.

The Dream and the Confession

The loss returns when Cima tells Hig that she has repeatedly dreamed of Tomas dying and calling for her while she stood apart, unable to help. In the dream, she eventually takes a knife and imagines ending his suffering. This is a dream, not an account of what she did in the hospital: the narrative distinguishes her actual absence from the action her sleeping mind supplies.

The confession comes during an exchange in which Hig has disclosed that he ended Melissa’s life at her request. Cima’s response makes the two losses speak to one another without making them equivalent: Hig describes an act he carried out, while Cima describes the act she imagines because she was not there. As she breaks down, Hig catches her. Their shared grief gives the memory a witness, but does not resolve her uncertainty about what she should have done.

Loss in a Failing World

Tomas’s death belongs to a narrative in which loss extends beyond human relationships. Hig mourns the disappearance of trout from streams warmed by changing conditions, fears the loss of the creeks themselves, and takes comfort in fishing in green, recovering woods. Later, even the carp he has caught appear weakened, and he imagines a future in which they too are gone. These ecological losses are not causes of Tomas’s death; they form a wider pattern in which private grief unfolds amid a world losing familiar lives and places.

That pattern sharpens the event’s emphasis on belatedness. Cima’s planned return, the ashes Joel holds, and the dream of a final encounter all preserve the shape of a reunion that could not happen in time. The death remains present not through a resolved account of what might have been, but through the repeated effort to understand an absence that cannot be repaired.