Us (7 page)

I rolled her down the back walk and around to the passenger side of our car. I helped her slide out of the desk chair and into the seat of the car. I buckled her in, closed her car door, and rolled the desk chair away from our car so that I wouldn't hit it when I backed our car out of the driveway.

The people in the doctor's office brought a wheelchair out to our car so that my wife could get across the parking lot and into the doctor's office. I signed my wife in and we waited in the waiting room. There were other people there who were dying too and we had to wait for them to go first. We waited for them to call my wife's name and then we waited in the examination room.

The nurse helped my wife take all her clothes off. I folded them up and held them in my lap. The nurse helped my wife put a hospital gown on that was cut open down the back and that had little ties on it to hold it together.

The nurse helped my wife get up and lie down on top of the table with the paper stretched over it. It crinkled and ripped when she moved. We talked to the nurse and answered her questions and then we waited for the nurse to come back into the examination room with the doctor.

The doctor told us that she just needed to sleep more. But we told him that we had become afraid of our bedroom and our bed and afraid of sleep. But the doctor told us that she needed to keep taking her pills to keep from having any more seizures and that she needed to take some other pills for sleep.

The doctor told us that she needed to go back to the hospital, but he let us go back to our house. We drove from the doctor's office to the drug store to get her prescriptions filled and get her some other things that we thought might help her.

We bought her pills to reduce pain, to maintain her immune system, to improve her memory, to keep her body tissue from shrinking, and to keep her heart and her lungs healthy enough so that she could feel and breathe. We bought her pills for her joints so that she could move her arms and her hands more and straighten her knees out enough to stand up again. We bought her skin cream to rub the wrinkles out of her skin. We bought her everything else that we could find that might help us keep her alive.

My wife only lived in the living room after we got back home again. I kept thinking that might somehow help keep her alive. We were afraid that if we moved her to anywhere else that she might die, so my wife stayed on the couch in the living room and did the rest of her living there. She slept there and I slept next to her on the floor.

I brought her vitamins and her other pills to take. I put her pills on her tongue and tipped the lip of a glass of water over her bottom lip so that she could swallow them. I fed her food with a spoon and waited for her to chew and swallow. I cleaned the extra food off her lips and her chin with the spoon and then with a napkin after she couldn't eat any more food. I gathered her bottles of pills and the food dishes all up and took them back into the kitchen.

But none of the food that she ate or the pills that she took helped her feel or get any better. We called the doctor up, but he said that he couldn't help her anymore unless we took her back to the hospital. But I couldn't take her back there or think of any other way to help her anymore. She couldn't get up to walk anywhere even with her walker and she couldn't move or talk much anymore either. She didn't want to live as little as she was then, only sitting up or lying down.

So we began to practice for how and when she might finish living and dying. We practiced more seizures, but the shaking made both of us afraid. We practiced strokes, but she was afraid that might leave her only half as much alive as she was then. We practiced heart attacks, but she didn't want her heart to stop first. We practiced overdoses with aspirins and vitamins. We considered slitting her wrists, but we thought that would have hurt too much. We tried to do a suffocation with a pillow, but I couldn't hold the pillow down.

We mostly practiced home death. Neither one of us wanted to go back to the hospital. But we practiced hospital death in case the ambulance came back to our house and took her back there. I got appliances from around our house and plugged them in around my wife—the microwave and the coffee maker, the alarm clock and any other appliances that had lights or numbers that lit up or that made beeps—and then I practiced unplugging them.

It got quiet when we had everything turned off or unplugged. It got hard for her to keep her eyes open anymore either. The breathing sounded hard coming out of her nose and her mouth. So we also practiced for her death with sleep. She would keep her eyes closed and change her breathing and push that hard last breath out of her lungs and her nose and her mouth.

We both took her sleeping pills so that we both could sleep. We were doing everything together that we could.

I kept some of the sleeping pills for myself and put the rest of them in her mouth for her. I lifted the glass of water up to her bottom lip and she lifted her head up off the pillow a little bit. I tipped the water into her mouth and she swallowed all her sleeping pills and started to fill up with sleep.

I swallowed mine so that I could sleep that sleep with her. I didn't want to wake up either. We both held onto each other. We looked at each other before we closed our eyes and let go of her.

I could feel you there with me while I slept. Sleeping felt better than being awake. I felt so light without my body around me and holding me down on the couch anymore. I was outside of me and outside of you too, but I didn't rise up or float away.

I watched you wake up and try to wake me up too. I could still feel you touch my face and my cheek. I liked the way you brushed my hair back with your hand. I liked the way you held onto my hands with your hands. They must have felt a little cold and a little wet, but they started to feel warm again when you held onto them. I want you to know that I stayed there with you and held onto you too.

I could almost hear her talking to me. She was near me or around me, next to me or holding me still. But she was gone too and I hadn't taken enough of her sleeping pills or I wasn't close enough to dying to go with her yet.

But I wanted to get my wife back. I turned the arms on all the clocks in all the rooms of our house back. I rolled the number of the date on my watch back to a day that she was alive on. I got some old calendars out and hung them up on the walls. I called up the old telephone numbers at the places where we used to live. I looked out the back window and into the backyard until I could see back to years ago. I kept looking behind me, but I couldn't find her standing back there anymore either.

She wasn't living in the living room or getting up off of the couch or out of our bed or taking a shower or fixing breakfast or making lunch or eating dinner or eating out or going out. She wasn't answering the telephone or listening to the answering machine or calling anybody back or sitting in the backyard or breaking a glass or taking her glasses off or the trash out or putting her lipstick on or washing her face or her hands.

She wasn't standing in the doorway or reading a book or looking out the window or at me or at old photographs or listening to old records or turning the radio on and dancing slow dances by herself or looking at herself in the bathroom mirror or brushing her teeth or her hair or touching her make-up up or tucking strands of hair behind her ear. She wasn't picking an outfit out or matching her shoes to her skirt or pulling her shirt on over her head or tucking her blouse down into her waistband or bending down to tie her shoelaces up.

She wasn't rearranging the furniture or preheating the oven or turning the stove on or microwaving anything frozen or waving goodbye or buying a book or a newspaper or a magazine or pumping gasoline or driving our car away down the highway or riding her bike up the driveway or running through the backyard or walking through the living room.

She wasn't looking through the cupboards or locking the windows and the doors or sweeping and mopping the floors or mowing the lawn or doing the laundry or folding the clothes or closing the blinds or shading her eyes or turning the lights off or lighting matches or planting flowers or watering plants or drinking water or mixing drinks or fixing her hair-do up or doing the dishes or stripping our bed down or unbuttoning her shirt or her blouse or unzipping her pants or her skirt or rolling her nylons down her legs.

She wasn't turning the air on or the heat down or falling down and breaking her arm and her hip or getting up or waking up or standing up or sitting down in any armchair or climbing up the front steps or walking up the sidewalk or setting out place settings or sitting down at the dinner table or saying my name or touching my arm or my hair or my face or forgetting my name or my face or looking away or taking her pills or going to the doctor or the hospital or trying to sit up and eat or drink or talk or breathe.

I woke up and the television was playing the national anthem and the flag was waving on the television screen. But then the music stopped playing and the flag stopped waving and the station went off the airwaves. The television light blurred my eyes and I filled up with static. I couldn't remember what part of my life I was living in anymore. That we were married was the last thing that I remembered.

My Grandmother Oliver slept on a bed that my Grandfather Oliver had made up for her in their living room. She couldn't get out of bed or get out of the pain that she was in during the last days that she was alive, but she wouldn't let my grandfather call for an ambulance. She wouldn't let him take her to the hospital and she wouldn't go to any more doctors and she didn't want any more of them coming over to their house either.

My grandfather did everything that he could for my grandmother. He tried to make the loss of the use of her body seem less terrible than it must have been for her. He fed her and cleaned her and dressed her and gave her the pills that she was supposed to take. He did anything that she asked him to do, but he was old and sick too. He could only walk and move slowly and sometimes she would get impatient with him. She knew that she wasn't going to be alive for very much longer and she was probably frustrated that she was able to do less and less for herself.

She ate less and sat up less. She couldn't walk on her own and then she couldn't walk with her walker or with her two canes or with any other kind of help that he could give to her. She couldn't stand up and then she couldn't get up, sit up, or even roll over onto her side in the bed. She couldn't change her own clothes or wash or clean her face or anything else. She couldn't feed herself or scratch an itch or rub something that hurt. She couldn't chew solid food and then even swallow soft food.

My grandfather cared for her so much and I keep thinking about what he must have been feeling then. I keep thinking about how he had to learn how to do those things for her and around the house. He had never done the laundry or the dishes or any other kind of cleaning around the house. He had to learn how to cook. He started with soup and with toast and with other food that was easy for him to make and easy for her to eat.

He learned about the laundry—what clothes could be washed together, when to use bleach, and how long things needed to stay inside the dryer—but worried about being away from her when he had to go downstairs to put the laundry in or take it out. He knew that it would take him so long to get back up to her upstairs in the living room, even if he could hear her ringing the metal ringer that he had left for her next to her bed. He wanted to be able to sit there with her so that he would be ready for her when she needed him.

But there wasn't anything that he could do that seemed to make her feel any better or even better enough to want to stay alive. He cared for her so much, but he couldn't make the physical pain leave her body.

They both knew that she wasn't ever going to get up out of that living room bed again. She stopped eating any more food and only drank water and ate ice chips. She stopped taking her pills and died early one morning a few days later, a few hours before she was supposed to wake up.

My grandfather stayed with her for a few hours before he called the doctor and the funeral home. My grandfather knew that was going to be the last time that he was going to be alone with her. But he was also waiting until she had been dead long enough so that she couldn't be revived. My grandmother didn't want to be only that much alive, even though my grandfather wanted her to be alive for as long as she could be.

My Grandmother Oliver wrote in her diaries throughout most of her life and they were passed on to me after she died. Other people inherited other things from her. People from her church took her clothes and her shoes. People from her quilting group picked up the boxes of scrap material that were never used, a few unfinished quilts, and packets of needles and spools of thread. My mother got my grandmother's antique sewing machine. My sister got most of her real jewelry and her costume jewelry too.

There were certain holiday dishes that my mother and my sister and my brother's wife each wanted—a series of plates with winter scenes on them, a group of bowls made out of colored glass, some ornate serving dishes that were just used on holidays and birthdays. They split them up with each other, but they all seemed to feel some sense of loss in this. Those holiday dishes meant so much to each of them, maybe the idea or the feeling of a whole family being together, but each one of them only got some of them.

But the diaries were the only things that I wanted from her after she died. I wanted to know what my grandmother had thought about for her whole life. I wanted to know what she wrote about the births of her two daughters and her three grandchildren. I wanted to know what she wrote about her daughter's scarlet fever from when she was little and her daughter's cancer that she died from forty years after that.