Michael Kimball - Us

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.