The Last Word On Nothing

I have never watched anyone die before, so I didn’t realize how much of it would be time spent watching Ativan dissolve in Morphine. The mixture is cloudy sea glass blue, ocean colored when it comes together. Florida is swamp hot in September, so hard to breathe, and I’m here swirling the two together in a graduated measuring cup every four hours, then every two, then every single one.

Every morning I’m sure my aunt will be gone, but now it’s been a week and each day she’s skinnier and greyer, groaning more, fighting less, but still breathing. When we hold her to wash her or turn her our fingers make pockmarks on her skin that don’t spring back, a sign that her circulation is slowing. This is supposed to be the good way to go, hospice at home, but instead it feels almost inhumanely drawn out, like we’re wallowing in the pain.

Donna, her Trump-voter neighbor comes and sits with her every day. She takes out the trash cans and brings in the mail and her care makes me teary. She tells my aunt stories while my mother and I shuffle around, cleaning out drawers, checking our watches for the next drug dose. It is slow motion sticky and we are waiting for everything. Waiting for the election, waiting for the pandemic to ebb, waiting for the Supreme Court nomination, for the fires to die back at home, for hurricane season to end, for the tourist season to start so we can sell the house, although it feels vulturey to think about that before she’s dead.

But we’ve cleaned out the house, chucked her old photos and journals and the things that must have felt important but are garbage now: her earring collection and painting supplies, the pain pills and other personal effects we tried to ignore in the top drawer. We sorted through the books and the tchotchkes, and all the other things that make up a life. We are trying to keep the house staged so it looks like a reasonable place to live, even after the center is gone.

It is easy to spiral out in the waiting. We got a second prescription of Ativan and it dissolves slower so I stir and poke and stir and poke and think too much about the natural disasters outside and the personal one here. It’s not pretty when it’s whittled down to bones. She hasn’t had anything to eat, and almost nothing to drink in weeks and still the engine of her lungs keeps going. She can still grip the bars of the bed when it hurts, and every once in a while she opens her eyes and looks at us. “What’s the weather?” she asks one morning, after not speaking for days.

What’s the weather? Sticky unreal hot, outside and in, especially when we open the windows to let the smell of decay go. I had thought I would walk to the grocery store or to the taco place nearby to get us lunch, the way I do at home, but the humidity is oppressive the second you step outside, and plus there are no sidewalks here. Another degree or two and I can’t imagine it being livable, but my idea of livable is changing fast these days.

I am supposed to be writing a story about climate and the election, and how the window of time to change things is closing fast and I keep transposing the cancer riddled body of the planet. Is this what it looks like, or might look like, too? A husk of a body around the person you love. A heart that keeps pumping even though everything is ravaged and you can’t imagine it going on. Or is it more like a house that you’re trying to dress up to look livable when all the good parts are given away or thrown out.

One morning, when my mother and I go down to the beach for a break, the gulf is so choked with hurricane debris that we don’t go in beyond our toes. But we spend a few minutes chasing the sanderlings in and out in the foam, because they’re still playing games. Still scuttling despite the warming and the storms. Like we are, too.

The weather, the waiting, the grief I know is coming but won’t quite let myself feel. It’s all stifling and hard to bear, and it’s probably just going to get worse. But in the meantime, we’re still getting up every morning in the heat, arranging the books on the shelves, measuring out the thin blue stream of Morphine, trying to temper the pain until the end, whenever that might be.

Image courtesy of Ana Rodriguez Carrington via flickr Creative Commons