Yet my imagination failed me. I didn’t take him at his word. I didn’t doubt that he wanted to die, nor did I fault him for wanting to die, but I didn’t believe it was the pain that made it so; I thought it was the indignity. The indignities. The twenty-four-hour nurse. The inability to clean himself, to use the bathroom on his own. The loss of privacy. The loss of control. He didn’t want to talk about those things to his daughter, for that would only increase the indignity. That’s what I thought. And I decided, right then and there, nine years ago now, that if ever I began to suffer that level of indignity, I would kill myself.
But now I know I was wrong. I was shallow. I was wrong about the conditions under which I would kill myself, and I was wrong not to take my father at his word. I do, as I’ve said, count myself lucky for not having had to suffer the indignities he suffered on top of my pain—lucky that you and your father (hopefully) won’t have had to see me that way, that I won’t have had to be seen that way—but I would, 100 out of 100 times, accept those indignities in place of the pain, even just in place of the anticipation of the pain. I could live with those indignities. And I would. But the pain, Belt.
The pain is indescribable. Or, rather, I won’t describe it. I’m afraid to describe it, to try describe it. Right now, as I write this, I don’t feel it—I, like my father had, have these windows—and I fear that attempting a description might somehow cause it to return sooner than it otherwise would, and, as much as I want to bring across my experience to you, as much as I want you to understand the state I’m in, were doing so to speed the pain’s return by even a second, it wouldn’t be worth it. That’s how bad it is. That’s how much I fear it.
That said, the pain is not, strictly speaking, unbearable. I don’t know how long I’ll be able to bear it, though. Right after I had that (first?) seizure in Hyde Park, it seemed my time was evenly split between the pain and its anticipation, but within not more than a couple of days, the ratio started favoring the pain, and that ratio has broadened, increasingly broadened at every interval, and the pain itself has gotten worse, and anticipating it has, correspondingly, grown more terrifying, my relief from it ever less…relieving.
One big fear of mine is that once the pain does become unbearable, I will be unable to do anything about it—I’ll be too far gone to end my life, or even physically incapable of ending my life, and I’ll just have to suffer til it ends on its own, and you will have to suffer watching me.
But then the other big fear of mine, of course, is that I end my life too soon. That I miss something—something between us, something between myself and your father—that I would have been better off sticking around for, despite the pain; some exchange of words or comfort that I not only possess the responsibility as your mother and his wife to stick around for, but that I would have, had I known the future, possessed a longing to stick around for.
The bigger of these two big fears is the first one. It just is. And so my aim is to err on the side of too soon: to stop the pain—to end my life—just before the pain becomes unbearable. Of course I want to err just as little as possible. Toward that end, I’ve had to define for myself what I imagine unbearable pain to be; I’ve had to define something that, as I’ve already said, is, if not indescribable, too fearsome to describe, even to myself. The definition that I’ve come up with is: pain so bad that I would kill you, my son, in order to prevent you from having to suffer it. The moment it seems to me that such pain is imminent—that’s the moment I’ll overdose.
If your father has done as I’ve asked him to—and I have no reason to believe he hasn’t, he promised—you were given this letter in the very same moment that you learned of my death, and, as you read it the first time, I doubt much of what I’m saying is getting through to you, but it comforts me to think that when you read this letter down the line, when you’re older, you’ll know I avoided the very worst. Not just that I didn’t (as I believe I’ve already demonstrated) choose, while in a state of rage or confusion, to die, but that I did not die in a state of rage or confusion. That I died when I should have, when it was the single best thing I could have done, and that I knew it was the single best thing I could have done. Please, for the sake of your own well-being, try to know those things as soon as you can. Knowing them won’t by any means make my death less devastating for you—I’m your only mother, and I’m gone—but it should mitigate any devastation that might have otherwise arisen from the fact that I died of suicide. That, at least, is my hope. Given the content of your journals, I think it’s a reasonable hope.
I love you, Belt. I have loved you all your life. Always know that first of all.
And Finally,
Mom
* * *
We read our letters and then, in the kitchen, we double-scooped ice cream from half-gallon cartons—one Mint Chocolate Chip, one Chocolate Chocolate Chip—into three bowls, stuck spoons in the bowls, and brought the bowls to the living room.
My mom was watching Star Wars.
We sat on either side of her.
We each ate a couple or three spoons of ice cream, then she started to cry, or to try to talk, and then she stopped crying or trying to talk, and she paused the movie, took our bowls from our laps and set them on the table, and extended her arms and hugged us together, all our heads touching, and I don’t know who was sobbing but one of us was sobbing, my father or me, and the other one told her we both understood, said, “I understand. He understands, too,” and for a while we remained that way, pressed head to head, then my mother sat upright, and we followed suit, and she gave us our bowls of ice cream back, and she unpaused Star Wars, and we finished our ice cream.
And my dad brought the rest of the ice cream from the freezer, and we passed the cartons back and forth between us and we all fell asleep before Star Wars was over, my mom, then my dad, and then at last me, and when the tape ended, the machine rewound it and played it again, and when it ended again the machine rewound it and played it again, and when it ended the third time, the click of the rewind engaging woke me, and I knew she was gone before I opened my eyes. The sun was in the window, glaring in the snow, and water was running in the bathroom downstairs, and the blister pack of Xanax and the jar of Dilaudid and the bottle of cherry-flavored morphine solution and the bottle of banana-flavored morphine solution that had been on the table beside the PC were not on the table beside the PC, and I woke up my father, who told me not to move.
LOOK AT YOUR FATHER
TWO FRIDAYS LATER, HALFWAY through the episode, my father said Miami Vice had gone to shit and, if it was okay with me, we’d skip the rest, and check out Sledge Hammer! I said I didn’t care, and he said it might be funny, he’d heard it was funny, and we hadn’t tried to watch anything that was funny in a pretty long time, and maybe that was exactly what we needed to do, was watch something funny and try to have a laugh or two, though he didn’t really feel like watching anything funny or having a laugh, but that that was why he thought it might be what we needed, and I said that we should watch whatever he wanted. And he said that he didn’t really care what we watched as long as it wasn’t Miami Vice. And he told me it was Sledge Hammer!’s season finale, that he’d seen a couple ads, and that’s how he knew that, and if it wasn’t a sitcom, it would be a bad idea to start with the finale, but since it was in fact a sitcom, it shouldn’t really matter where you started at all because you didn’t have to care about the characters in sitcoms since all they were there to do was make jokes and you didn’t have to know what happened to them last week, or the week before that, or any other time because they’d always act the same no matter what had happened and their jokes would be gettable. It wasn’t like books, where you had to pay attention and the jokes weren’t funny unless you kept track of things.