Last night, I told my wife the name of God again. She didn’t remember it. I held her under our blankets, whispered it in her ear, and then she looked at me like I hadn’t just shared with her the most sacred secret of the universe. She turned away in our bed and whispered back “I love you too,” then she fell asleep.

I’d tell her in the sun-filled mornings when she'd have drool drying on the corner of her mouth, and during the fading nights when I’d have trouble sleeping, and she’d snore and lay her frigid feet on my calves. In some of our petty arguments, I’d say it and she wouldn’t bat an eye but she was ready to forgive afterward because she thought it pointless to stay mad. I screamed it once—when she was in the bathroom and I was seasoning meat for dinner in the kitchen—loud enough that I hoped it left a remarkable imprint on her mind. Every single time, she would fail to recall it. The name of a powerful divine being isn’t something you just forget.

The name of God came to me decades ago. I had gotten into an accident which resulted in a numb right arm and my wife—we were just friends back then—had written me a song as I laid in a hospital bed. She had remembered my favorite lines from books I’d read and incorporated them into her lyrics. 

“You’re loved to the point of belly-aching laughter,” she had sung, “More beautiful than the gods smiling in the rocks.”

Immediately after, an angel had come down—or at least what I thought was an angel—in a brillant haloed light and told me the hallowed truth. A truth that had buzzed my mind to flames, lighting me up like the sun. It pricked my skin to goosebumps. I told my wife what I’d just heard with a breathless intensity, but she only smiled. Devout worshippers have studied ancient texts that have survived centuries of conflict and change, and the name of God was revealed to a teenage girl who had just broken her arm.

Fifty years have gone by since then. Now, crows rest their feet in the linings of our eyes, and our smiles leave faint markings in our cheeks, and still my wife forgets the name. Her memory seems to be getting worse, but I’m not annoyed anymore, rather, more amused than anything. I only share this secret with her, nobody else, and even if she doesn’t remember, I’ll tell her as many times as she needs to hear it. She will speak the name back to me eventually, and when that time comes, we will revel in a heaven that’s only shared in the bones of our home.

The memories my wife and I have created are floating away from her mind, but that's something I had expected from her in our old age. Home is lost to her, the neighbors are faceless, and my name is foreign. She stares at the silver ring on her left hand with an empty gaze instead of with that tender warmness she held for all her life. 

I take her hand, wrinkled and dry, and ask her again, “Do you know the name of God?” and she turns away in silence. She’s always turning away, I can never see her face when I ask her this. 

“I’m not losing my marbles, am I?” She jokes one day.

“Maybe you are, Alice. Who’s to say?” I laugh and my fingers slip between hers, clutching them like the world will crumble away if I don’t hold her close. I bring her knuckles to my lips, and I send a silent prayer to God. Our Father, may her name be kept holy. Let her remember us, even in another time. I feel her fragile bones beneath my touch and I clutch tighter. She squeezes back, briefly. Her head has forgotten me, but her heart remembers—it always has. It will ache in tandem with mine.

The name of God is etched into the walls of my throat with scriptures tucked beneath my tongue. It’s cruel that He introduced himself to me via angel, but it could have been worse. God could have smote me the day He revealed His name to me, turned me blind or swallowed me whole. But He didn’t, and it’s a surprise that I’m still able to stand on my own two feet, feel the steady pulse in my veins, and risk my breath leaving me everytime my wife smiles. 

“Hello…” my wife says to me in the polite way strangers do. She averts her eyes, tilts her head to the ground, almost scared to say anything more.

I hand her a warm cup of green tea, her favorite drink in the morning. “It’s the way you like it,” I say and she takes it and her face brightens like yes this is my favorite drink! How could I forget, silly me.

I try to convince myself that this stone in my chest isn’t grief because she is still here, she is not lost to me. Not yet. But everytime she looks at me, it doesn’t register that I’ve been by her side for decades. She stares at me like it’s the first time she’s met me, but I believe that to be a small comfort. Once upon a time, I met the love of my life and our beginning was a quiet shock to our pulses. We didn’t realize that it would fry us like lightning.

I embrace her. Her arms are empty and loose. They don’t come up to return the gesture. She’s real and solid and with me, I tell myself, even if her memories are slipping away and I couldn’t run after them to put them back in their proper place.

I ask her once again, “Do you know the name of God? It’s-” and she presses her head in the crook of my neck, trying to find some semblance of comfort and familiarity in the hug of a stranger.