Here is a story where no one dies. She was so cold when they finally went in. What was the name? (Frenchies? No, that was that strange man at the bar.) Marshall’s Tavern. I remember. Marathon, Ontario. There was all that stuff about Ladies’ Dining Room and registered with the Liquor Control Board. You made a weak joke (You were already very weak, the cold and the rocky shore had taken what little was left from you, you were dying, we should have let you die.) about controlling your liquor. The Hemlock Society recipe suggests the best cognac to wash down the pills. (Hennessey one of the Wild Geese, went away to France.) VSOP. “RSVP?” you joked. (Yes, I said solemnly, Duty Free. We shared a solemn laugh.) You were really feeling very giddy, very carefree, what with finally being out of the cold and facing the end of the pain ahead. (“I feel like something washed up on this shore,” you said. And the name of the motel? It had to be the Marathon, didn’t it? The Marathon Hotel?) All I remember is the wallboard, drafty cheap stuff slapped up over the original walls, pink paint showing through where the panelling had peeled back like a tongue where someone’s fist went through it. (One of the frequent complaints about the Twilight Doctor was that he administered gas to his patients from a makeshift wooden apparatus built into in the back of a rusty Volkswagen camper. We like death to come under stainless steel lights and ceramic tiles the color of surgical scrubs. On some shores phosphorescent creatures wash up and the whole beach glows greenly in the night.) The panelling was supposed to be birdseye maple: a honey brown skin of eyes laminated over masonite. You held me so tight I could feel the cognac warm you, the pain already easing.
My mother lay on honey oak flooring of the upper hall, her eyes rolled terribly back into her head so all there was was white (faint broken blood vessels, delicate as threads). She wanted to die. A huge woman yet fallen with a ballerina's grace from my arms when I could not hold her as she wobbled just before we reached the bathroom (I have to go, she said, later when she died.). The voluptuous pale flesh of her upper arms slightly jaundiced and she now beached with the grace and delicacy of a whale-cow stranded mysterious on some far cape. (I sponged the same wattled flesh before her death.) Only her head settled abruptly, the burred dutch skull (raven hair lost to chemotherapy), her great head banging against the oak so solidly I let out a cry.
“Oh honey, don’t die now, please! You can’t, do you hear me, hon? Please! He’ll never forgive you if you die while he is gone. Please, mom, please.”
My father away in search of magic foods (cream of rice, gatorade, saltines: whatever she might get down, whatever might revive her). “Fodder,” she had said an hour before. “He thinks he can keep me alive like the irishman’s cow.”
It wasn’t so bitter as it sounds. Not so sad. She knew he loved her. O please don’t die now. Please mom, please hon. Fodder and father farther away. (There weren’t these clever words then: please please please.) The eyes rolled down again and my brother arrived and we somehow got her back into the bedroom and propped up on the pillows and under the covers.
We could feel the warmth come back to her. She died in two days.