Still, I Cannot Save You, page 18
“Hello? Hello in there, birthday girl!” a familiar voice called from the hallway. Meghan’s face widened in horror when Phyllis popped into the room with an exhausting level of energy, Sam and Lily following behind her. Mom, Dad, and I gawped at one another. Meghan had forbidden all visitors, Phyllis included, but it hadn’t stopped the woman from pressing to bring the kids in because they missed their mother and she thought it was what Meghan wanted, too. Part of me understood—we were all fretting over the loss of connection Sam and Lily must have been feeling but were unsure of how to handle it because it was inevitable, devasting, too much to bear. What Phyllis didn’t seem to appreciate was that seeing their mom wouldn’t be the comfort she imagined for the children or my sister. If Meghan was frightened by her own reflection, what would her children see, especially when they were too young to understand the change? And what was it like for Meghan to see them and feel such impending grief of her own? So we left it to Meghan to dictate if she wanted Sam and Lily to visit, because she hated having parenting decisions made by others as though she wasn’t still here, capable of making them herself. But she hadn’t asked. Not once. I’ll scare them, Kell .
There was no time to calculate how Phyllis had gained entry, because she launched into a round of birthday wishes. One of the nurses peeked into the room with a Dairy Queen log cake, the start of “Happy Birthday” echoing until Sam caught on. Mom, Dad, and I sang obligingly and smiled while feeling none of the emotions that usually went along with this ritual. We watched as Sam clambered up the hospital bed to help blow out the lone candle with a slobbery puff of air. Meghan pasted on a grin that belied countless emotions—fear, anger, love. She kissed Sam all over his face as the nurse sliced the dessert and we slurped at melting ice cream cake, unsure of what to say.
“They miss you so much,” Phyllis said cheerfully. She had Lily balanced on her lap, but she lowered her to the ground where she wobbled but righted herself. “See how big they’re getting? I bet you notice a huge change, right?”
Meghan didn’t respond as she wiped a smear of ice cream from Sam’s cheek. The tension in the room was thick.
“Lily, come see Mommy. Let’s have a cuddle with your brother.” Meghan held her spindly arms out, but it was as if the baby didn’t hear. Lily wandered out the hall to test her new walking abilities, even as Meghan kept calling to her.
“Look at her go!” Phyllis laughed as she scooped another bite of cake. She was trying, I knew, but was so far off the mark that I had to fight the desire to kick her out.
“You know what kids are like, Meggie,” Mom interjected. “Once they learn how to move, nothing can keep them confined to one spot for long.”
“That’s right. You were the same way,” Dad said. “Always on the go.”
Meghan shook her head over and over, bottom lip wobbling. “She doesn’t remember me.”
Dad threw his cake in the garbage and left to chase Lily down the hall. I couldn’t stand any of it, so I stared at the painting on the wall, some landscape thing, and dreamt of being in that grassy hedge, somewhere far away from room ten.
* * *
—
Later, melted dairy coagulated on paper plates while the kids played in the grassy courtyard of the hospice. Stubby boxwoods formed a diamond pattern that criss-crossed with paving stones, capped by a cedar gazebo that smelled like summer docks heated by the sun. I chased Sam through the sunlight as he deked to the left and I ran towards his happy squeals. Then he halted in his tracks and whipped around to face me and I almost smacked right into him.
“Auntie, my truck has cancer like Mommy.” He held a dinky car up as evidence, appearing stoic at this diagnosis. I had nothing to say to this, nothing at all, so I scooped him into my arms and held him upside down, marvelled at his face that was a perfect reflection of my sister’s when she was four.
“Can someone take me inside?” Meghan called out. Despite the heat wave, Meghan was draped in blankets on the bench we’d managed to set her on. She was green with pain and nausea. We’d had to balance her on a tuffet of pillows to accommodate her bed sores, but even so, she’d only lasted ten minutes.
“Mum, no!” Sam wriggled free from me and ran to Meghan, flinging himself into her arms. It made her wince, but she leaned into the hug, covering his cheeks with kisses.
“I’m sorry, Sammy, but Mommy’s tummy hurts. She needs to go lie down.”
Sam did not complain that Mommy always hurt, or that Mommy was always lying down. Instead, he watched as the nurses carried her indoors and laid her gently on her bed, tucked in the blankets, pressed the morphine bolus. Her eyes rolled drunkenly while Sam watched, his grip tight on the hospital sheets at her feet.
“You want to lie with Mommy for a while, bud?”
He nodded and reached for me to lift him, sinking into her as her arms reflexively snaked around his shoulders. They fell asleep holding one another and I watched them from the recliner, tears wet on my cheeks, while our parents managed Phyllis and Lily outside.
This was the reason she hadn’t asked to see the children, because she knew it would be like this. Somehow it was clear to me that this would be the last time she would see them, but we never spoke of it. Of all the horrible things we’d had to endure in the past year, this was the harshest truth, the one we couldn’t face.
twenty-four
“She’s such an attention whore, am I right?” I said to Annie, our favourite nurse, while rubbing Meghan’s cold feet with lavender oil. “My sister and her cancer, making it all about her.” The jokes, I hoped, allowed Meghan to transport herself somewhere else as the nurse fiddled with the morphine pump settings. Despite hallucinations and a dosage that should have doped a farm animal, Meghan’s pain management needs keep increasing. Earlier in the morning, she had woken me with detailed descriptions of her new magic beans. Did I want some? And look, look, Kelly, at my new compact, and she patted on invisible powder with a puff, then lined her pout with air lipstick.
“Everything in the world is all about me,” Meghan croaked, pawing at her dry throat. She had grown too weak to hold a water glass, so I wiggled the straw until it met her lips, then used my sleeve to dab at the dribble down her chin. After four weeks in hospice, her body was failing by slow degrees. When I noticed she hadn’t peed in more than twenty-four hours, the nurses inserted a catheter, and a gush of orange urine filled the waiting bag. Her pulse was slowing and her skin was taut against bone. When she slept, I took videos of her breathing, photos of her hands, documenting what I feared I’d miss when she was gone.
“Don’t we know it, lady!” Annie tucked Meghan neatly into the blankets she’d brought fresh from the industrial warmer. The material filled the room with the scent of bleach. “Then again, as our longest-term resident, you get all the extra attention you want.”
Even though it had only been a month, it felt like an impossibly long time. Other residents came and went, literally, within days. But in the context of dying, Meghan was young: her heart, at least, was healthy, and this kept her going even when Mom, Dad, and I dreamt—out of compassion, selfishness, exhaustion—that her pain would end. I have never, ever seen anyone suffer like this, Annie had said to me last week, tearing up as she folded me into a hug, her soft body like a favourite pillow. I was relieved, oddly, to know this was as bad as it could get, and yet part of me knew it could be, had been, so much worse outside of the hospice. In room ten she was loved, safe, could focus on the labour of dying. Death wasn’t the saddest thing compared to all that came before.
“That’s me,” Meghan said, grimacing as she adjusted herself in bed. “Always knew I’d break some kind of record.”
“And longest-lasting hospice resident is the record you wanted to set? You need loftier goals, Meg.” I wiped excess oil onto the warm blanket, sinking my fingertips into the heat.
“Well, you and your parents have been here every day too,” Annie said to me. “You two are like our sister warriors.” She pressed to smooth Meghan’s fentanyl patch on her upper arm and wiggled her fingers goodbye.
“She’s right,” Meghan said once we were alone. “You’ve practically moved in here. You should go home. Enjoy some time with Joe. Pot Roast, too.”
I climbed into Meghan’s bed as usual.
“Meg, wherever you are, that’s where I am. Okay? I’m not going anywhere.”
She patted my leg over and over until the gesture no longer felt intentional, more like a nervous tic. “I’m tired, Kell. I’m always so tired.”
“We can clean you up before bed, if you want. Get you nice and warm.”
“It’s too much work.”
“Stop being so lazy. Let’s get you in the shower, eh? You stink.” I held my nose for comedic effect.
“Do I?” She sniffed a pit in response, moving in perpetual slow-motion.
“Of course not.” If she knew I was lying, she didn’t say. My sister smelled of rot, likely because her coccyx was exposed from weight loss, gangrenous around the edges, with the rest of her covered in a scaly rash, weeping bedsores. When I handled these delicate edges of her, I tried to picture her former self—plump cheeks and dimpled thighs, just like mine. “But it’ll make you feel better.”
She acquiesced and raised her arms like a child reaching for her mother, and I lifted her up and into the wheelchair, then pushed her across the hall to the bathroom. I lay a towel across her for modesty and then tugged the nightgown over her head, leaving it in a heap for laundry.
“You’ve seen a lot more of me than anyone wants to see of their sister.” Meghan signalled to her nudity. “I’m starting to lose count of how many times you’ve literally had to wash me.”
I set the water on warm and dangled fingertips in the stream to test the heat, then locked the shower seat into place, stepping over the tiled lip that kept the water from seeping out the door.
“I am but your lowly servant. Ready?” I squatted in front of her and held my arms out for her to grab.
“I’m not sure I’ll be able to step over that,” she said, looking towards the shower curb. Tension tipped her voice upwards.
“We’ll manage, Meg, don’t worry. I’ve got you.” I imagined she didn’t even weigh seventy pounds, not even as much as Pot Roast. I wrapped my arms under her armpits, lifted up until she was standing facing me. Together, we waddled, me moving backwards towards the spray. Slowly, like she was gliding across water, Meghan lifted one leg, then another, across the boundary before she started to shake with weakness.
“Kelly, oh my God, no.” Meghan let out a long, continuous wail as her legs gave way beneath her, strength seeping towards the drain. “I’m falling, Kell. I’m gonna fall. Don’t let me fall!” I widened my stance, which set me directly in front of the water’s stream, and as I tightened my arms around her, her face pressed into my chest so that I worried I would smother her. Water poured over us, into our mouths, and still, she wailed this animalistic sound.
“Meg. Meghan! Calm down. I’m not going to drop you. You’re safe. You’re okay.” Her skin slipped against mine, but I somehow managed to ease her into the shower seat and tilt the nozzle towards her lap instead of her face. Placed there, she breathed heavily to recover. My heart raced with abject terror.
“I’m sorry,” she said, voice small as she held tight to the edges of the seat. “I freaked out.”
“Hey, we made it, right?” I gave a weak smile and stepped out of the water to grab body wash and a cloth.
“Oh my God. Your clothes are soaked.”
“I have other clothes here. Not a big deal.”
“No, Kell.” She kissed my knuckles like I was a princess. “It’s a big deal. The biggest.”
I kissed the crown of her head and then gently glided a soapy washcloth across her fragile skin. Meghan leaned into the spray, murmuring with pleasure from the heat, opening her mouth to let water trickle in, then allowing it to dribble down her front. I took tender care around her new sharp edges. The terrycloth, I feared, was scraping her skin, so eventually I abandoned the cloth to allow my hands to do the work, savouring the strange intimacy of her naked body so boldly bared. After soaping and conditioning her hair, we laboured through the process in reverse, getting her dry and back into the wheelchair in a new pair of pyjamas before I tucked her back into bed and changed my own clothes.
“That was exhausting,” she said, tugging the blankets to her chin. “But worth it. I’m snug as a bug. Will you read to me to help me fall asleep? From your book?”
“I thought you just wanted to listen to me type all day.” In the brief moments when she slept soundly, I worked on my book, determined, out of some sense of duty to Meghan, not to ask my publisher for an extension. We didn’t talk about how she’d be long dead by the time my dream would actualize. A year away.
“I just like the sound of you working, doing what you love. You know, your next book should be about you and me. Christ knows I’ve given you enough material. You’d have to tell it all, though. All the ugliness.” She grunted a laugh but clutched her sore stomach. The sun dipped behind the horizon and the room sank into semi-darkness.
“Knock, knock.” Annie popped her head in. “Hey, dolls. Meg, you up for something to help you get to la-la-land tonight?” She rattled a pill in a tiny plastic cup and wobbled a thumbs-up.
“Oh, I’m fine. I don’t need anything,” Meghan said.
“You sure, hun? Might help with the anxiety.”
No matter who was spending the night, Meghan woke us countless times, panic taking over. My subconscious had started to wait for these tides of fear so that I was prepared to get up from the daybed and snap on the TV to distract, crack a joke, get a cup of tea. But my tactics were waning in their efficacy.
“I just don’t think I should,” she said uneasily. “I don’t want sedatives to become my way of coping. It’s not healthy, right?”
“Healthy? You mean because you did drugs seven years ago?” I rubbed fingertips up and down her arm. She nodded, looking ashamed. I couldn’t help snorting. “Geez, Meg, I admire the dedication, but I think when you’re dying you get to throw addiction caution to the wind.”
“Really?” She fiddled nervously with the edge of the sheet and looked to Annie. “You sure?”
“What’s the worst that can happen? An overdose?”
“Think of me as your dealer, gorgeous. A legal dealer.” She gave Meghan’s foot a loving squeeze and put the plastic cup on her lap. “It’s all about peace and comfort now. Let us give you that. Let the Gucci meds give you that.”
Once Annie left, Meghan pointed for some water, then strained to ease a slip of liquid up the straw to make the pill disappear.
“I hope that works. God, Kell, I’m freaking out.” What was there to say to this? She swallowed over and over until I brought the barf bucket to her chest, but she shook her head and pushed it away. Each day, she heaved litre upon litre of barf into the plastic tubs we held for her. Sometimes I willed myself in place despite my phobia; other times I ran down the hall in a panic, calling for a nurse. When I returned to the hospice after a night at Mom and Dad’s, I approached the room anxious, tired, desperate for the end, and then hated myself for that horrible, dark desire. “I wish there was something they could give me to just knock me out. I mean, what am I waiting for?” Her eyelids bobbed and so did her chin, the medication taking effect. “But then, I guess that would be asking them to kill me, wouldn’t it?”
How many times had I wondered what she was waiting for? Because there was no perfect ending to hold out for. The kids would lose their mother and Bernard was not going to suddenly atone so that she could slip peacefully towards some cheesy light. It felt like she was waiting for a fairy tale.
“So, not just something to help you sleep,” I said carefully. “Is that what you mean?” I wanted her to mean it, wanted the pain-free release of an assisted death, for her, and for us.
“I don’t know what I mean, Kell.”
“If you’re ready for that, then I’ll talk to the doctor for you tomorrow, okay?”
“Yeah. Maybe.”
When I asked her about the conversation the following morning, she claimed to not remember. But my sister had never been good at lying to me.
twenty-five
“So,” Dr. Mohabi said, leaning into Meghan’s bedside, bobbing a loafered foot up and down. Her neat blonde hair and tidy grooming was a stark contrast to the rest of us, who looked post-apocalyptic from lack of sleep and showering. Mom, Dad, Meghan, some nurses, and I had collected in room ten for the meeting the doctor had called, and we were packed in tight and uncomfortable. “I think it’s time we talked palliative sedation to help ease your suffering here, Meghan.”
The doctor explained that Meghan would receive the drug Versed through a continuous pump, much like her morphine, which would slip her into a twilight zone of consciousness, somewhat aware of her surroundings but unable to communicate. She would not be able to eat or drink and would die in days. To help ease your suffering. In the past week, in addition to the litres of vomit, Meghan steadily spat up bile like tobacco juice into a spittoon. She was in constant, moan-filled pain. She couldn’t stand. Couldn’t shower. Had a catheter and a diaper, her dignity disintegrating like her skin.
Dr. Mohabi barely had time to finish her sentence. “Yup. I’m ready,” Meghan croaked, lids squeezed shut. I looked to her, shocked, having expected some fight, for her to ask questions. To say she needed more time. To ask to see the kids. To wait for Bernard. I’d been waiting for this—some guaranteed end-state—but now it was happening so fast.
Mom and Dad were clutching one another awkwardly at their elbows, tears sneaking down their cheeks, while I leaned into the wall and pressed myself against the cold in the hope that I would find something tangible and assured. Meghan retched another glob of black bile into a kidney basin, and Mom leaned in to smooth her hair from her face.
