Three Women by Marge Piercy
“Im…portant…others.”
“Likewise for me. Besides, she let me down too. When I came back from college, I’d been replaced. She was crazy about Suwanda—she’d just adopted her—and suddenly I was no longer the golden girl. But you and I are more alike than you realize in how we deal with things. You had Karla take care of me, and I get Elena to help and the agency.”
Beverly nodded. She let her head loll back on the pillow. “Tired.”
Suzanne started to rise. “I’ll let you rest then.”
Beverly stopped her with a hand on her arm. “Must talk.”
Suzanne took her seat again. “Sure. What’s on your mind?”
“You know. Want die.”
“Yeah. You want to die.” She looked hard at her mother. “You’re asking me to commit murder, you understand that, Mother.”
Beverly shrugged. “Do…careful.”
“I teach the law. I am an officer of the court. We’ve already had one notorious case touching this family.”
Tears rolled out of Beverly’s eyes. “No…go on. No.”
“What am I supposed to do?” Suzanne asked out loud.
“Pills.”
“What kind of pills?”
Beverly gestured toward the bookcase she had been using as a dresser. “Top…shelf.”
Suzanne went to the bookcase. She saw only socks and stockings and mittens. A jar of oversize safety pins. “What am I looking for?”
“Print…out.”
She found a sheaf of papers under the socks, downloaded from the Internet, from last July before Beverly’s second stroke. It consisted of descriptions of various ways for terminally ill people to end their lives. “But you’re not terminally ill.”
Beverly had been writing on her pad. NO END. WORSE THAN TERMINAL. On a second sheet she continued printing, LITTLE ME LEFT. ALL I VALUE GONE. BURDEN. THIS NOT LIFE!
Beverly felt exhausted and frustrated. To say something simple, almost simpleminded, took all her strength. Why couldn’t she make Suzanne understand? There had to be a way to get through to her. Her thoughts raced in her head, although sometimes a word or a phrase eluded her and she had to make do with some equivalent, but what came out of her mouth was crude and jerky. It was not what she wanted to say, but a brief headline version. Everything became a summary, a synopsis, a piece torn from her meaning. It wasn’t enough to sustain her interest just to eat, shit, and sleep. She was trapped in this broken mind and partly paralyzed body. She was tired of it, tired to death. If only she could make them feel what she felt. But how? “Why you…make…me stay?”
“Is it that bad here?”
Beverly nodded fervently. She longed to tell Suzanne it wasn’t anything wrong she was doing. This was not Beverly’s life, rather Suzanne’s she was squatting in the middle of, out of place, unable to communicate, unable to act.
“Would you be happier in some kind of facility?”
“No! No!” That was living death: to be stored with the other dysfunctional to be minimally tended by underpaid staff who had no idea who she had been and did not care. “On steps…disappointed.”
Suzanne pondered for a moment. “Are you talking about this summer?”
Beverly nodded. “Bad day.”
“It sure was.”
“Marta free. Elena okay.” She hated to hear herself talk. It was humiliating to sound like a two-year-old or someone who had only begun to learn English. Every time she opened her mouth, she cringed. She printed, NOW TIME HELP ME!
“We’re trying to help you. Elena and I and the aides who come in make sure you walk every day. We try to give you what you need, Mother, even if you don’t think we succeed.”
She glared. How could Suzanne so stubbornly refuse to understand? She felt taken advantage of. Because she could barely argue her case, Suzanne could pretend she did not know what Beverly wanted. “Help…die. Only help…want.”
Suzanne was silent for a long time. Beverly waited her out, staring. Did her daughter really think she would forget what she wanted so passionately, that she would change her mind, that she would drop the subject? Fat chance. She would not let Suzanne forget what had to be done. She would hound her daughter until she got her way. She had to communicate her desperation, even though she felt like a toddler in a high chair banging a spoon. “Only…thing…want.” She hit her good hand against her chest. God, she was skinny and flabby. Her own body disgusted her. It was not the body she had nourished and cared for, the vehicle of her will and her pleasure. “Die!”
Suzanne began to weep. Beverly wished she could hit her. How dare her daughter sit and weep because of what she wanted and desperately needed? As if the whole family wouldn’t be much better off with her out of the house. How dare Suzanne assume she was not aware how much her illness was costing—she’d asked the aides what they were paid and multiplied that by two—and for what? Boredom and pain and disgust. She glared at her daughter, who looked up, saw her, and began to cry harder. This is a big help, Beverly thought, a great big help, as if crying made anything different. She was never a weeper. Karla was. Since they’d been little girls, she had wept at anything: you only had to tell her a dog had been run over or a bird had hit a window, and she was off. In the movies, she was always blubbering. Sometimes Beverly had refused to sit with her. In fact, Suzanne had been the same way, but Beverly had shamed it out of her, making her more stoical, stronger. It was undignified to be constantly spouting tears. Women who relied on crying to get their way should be ashamed. Never had she used tears as a weapon, and she was immune to them. Suzanne could blubber all night, but Beverly would not alter one jot of her intent.
Suzanne felt despair like a cold rock in her abdomen. Beverly was not going to relent. She was not going to stop sitting there like a furious owl glaring and repeating in that low cracked voice that she wanted to die. She could just see explaining to Beverly’s doctors that her mother was bent on suicide, except that Beverly was far too helpless to commit suicide. Suzanne would be responsible for killing her.
Suzanne had fought legal battles for twenty-five years, but never had she killed anything larger than an earwig. She had lived her life non-violently. She could not even imagine helping her mother die. She still had in her lap the sheaf of papers Beverly had insisted she take from the shelf. Obviously Beverly had been contemplating suicide even before her second stroke. Obviously she was not about to change her mind, no matter what Suzanne argued. She felt trapped. Whatever she did would bring an avalanche of guilt down on her. She would be buried in guilt whether she refused to help her mother die, or whether she was coerced into killing her. How could she live with either choice?
She waved the papers. “I’ll read this and get back to you.” How ridiculous that sounded, as if it were a brief on which she was offering an opinion.
“Help…me.”
“I’ll do what I can, Mother. I’ll do what I can.”
Beverly reached out with her good hand and grasped Suzanne’s wrist, hard. Suzanne was surprised how much strength Beverly could muster. Her mother’s gaze never wavered from hers. She seemed determined not to blink. “Must, Suze, must.”
Suze: what her mother had called her when she was a little girl, and Beverly was actually pleased with her. She was not so much touched as briefly amused. “You’re a crafty old manipulator, Beverly. You won’t give up, will you?”
“No.”
“I’ll read the material and consider very seriously what I can do. Now, let go of my arm, Mother.” She then bent down and kissed her on the forehead.
Beverly held on for another minute and then let go. “Tomorrow.”
“Yes, tomorrow we’ll talk again. That’s a promise.”
Suzanne turned out the lights and went into her office. What her mother had given her did not exactly seem like bedroom reading. She sat down at her desk to read the directions for ending her mother’s life. She wished that she drank whisky, but the strongest thing she ever consumed was sherry, at the dean’s
As she was reading, she got a call from a California lawyer who owed her a favor. She had talked him into helping on Jake’s case. “It’s bad. The judge has just given instructions to the jury that practically preclude anything but a guilty verdict including the conspiracy charge, which is the real killer. I think there’re plenty of grounds for appeal, but since I came in late, I won’t know till I see the complete court transcripts.”
“There’s really a chance Jake could go to prison?”
“I’d say the odds are on it.”
46
Elena
Elena listened to her mother going on about this case in Florida where the guy got a suspended sentence for helping his wife die and this case where a guy got fifteen years house arrest. Then there was a case in North Carolina where a son was convicted of first-degree murder, in spite of the fact that his father was dying and begging him to end his suffering. Now she was talking about something called Cruzan.
“It’s a crap game,” Suzanne said, putting down her notes. “There is no state in which the law recognizes the right of a family member to help someone die, even when they have begged for it and are in terrible pain.” Suzanne rose and began pacing, not frantically but almost to Elena’s eyes with a mechanical precision, turning each time on her heel. “For exactly the same act, juries have repeatedly let the defendant go free while other juries have sent people to prison for life. The standard defense is the kind of temporary insanity plea. Everybody knows it’s patently untrue, but the juries will often seize on it to justify what happened. And in Washington v. Glucksberg, the Supreme Court opinion, written by Rehnquist, made a strong distinction between withholding medical treatment and affirmatively giving someone medication that could kill, thus overturning the decisions maintaining the right to die from the Second and Ninth Circuit Courts.”
“So a lot of these guys took a gun and snuffed the one they loved. But we’re talking about pills,” Elena said. “If we do it right, there’s no murder investigation. Come on, Mother, we should be able to help her.”
Suzanne sat down again to the pages of notes she had brought with her to this little meeting in her home office with the door shut. “You’re convinced we should do this?”
“Mother, she’s been begging me for two months before she ever asked you. I can’t refuse her, just to protect my own neck. I love Grandma.”
“I love her too—”
“But you have a lot of history. She was always there for me. She never judged me. I owe her this.”
“The fact that I have history with her makes it even more complicated. How do we know we haven’t made her feel guilty for being dependent on us?”
“She does feel guilty for being dependent. Wouldn’t you?”
“Then we’re failing. How do we know we’re not subtly encouraging this for our own convenience?”
“I suppose because, according to you, we could both go to prison for life.”
“But don’t you sometimes feel imprisoned now? Don’t you wish you didn’t have to rush back here to sit with her? To help her to the bathroom. To change bedpans or sheets when she doesn’t make it to the bathroom in time. To help her bathe. To help her eat. To take her to the doctors and the therapists. Doesn’t that get to you?”
“Yeah, sometimes. Sometimes not. I have more patience than you do.”
“The cats have more patience than I do. But don’t you see, Elena, we have motive. How can we be sure it’s not our own convenience we’re acting on?”
“Because she’s been asking and asking again. She’s in despair. She hates her life now, Mother. Can’t you understand that, can’t you try to see this from her point of view, just this once?”
Suzanne sighed. “I hate suicide. I can’t help it. When I think you almost killed yourself when you were fifteen—”
“Come on, Mother, that’s ancient. It was never my idea. It’s one thing Marta was right about. Chad wanted to die, he was so bullshit at his father. He was just ripped. He didn’t want the life his father was making him live. He felt he’d rather die than go to military school. I was just fucking bored.”
“I know you don’t like my starting with the legal aspects, but that’s how I come at it. I can divide our research into several parts—”
“Research?” Elena heard her voice rise in a spiral.
Suzanne looked at her in surprise. “Yes, research. First, the law. Second, available methods, pros and cons, and of those methods, determine which are actually practical for Beverly and for us. Then, once we have chosen a method, if we both decide it is advisable to proceed, how to do it.”
Elena laughed dryly. “Here we are, working together, Mother. For perhaps the first time.”
“Is it really? I guess it is.” Suzanne lay back in her desk chair and closed her eyes for a moment. “I wish it was less grim.”
“Why should it be grim? We’re working to release her. It’s the best present we could give her. We have to do it for her, Mother. We both promised.”
“Yes, we did, Elena, we must be out of our minds.” Suzanne raised her hand wearily to forestall a reaction. “One of the thorniest points is that she is not dying, she is not in unbearable pain. She simply feels helpless and hopeless and she wants to be done with a struggle she’s losing. Okay. Now the practical.” Her mother brought out the sheaf of papers Elena recognized as Grandma’s printout.
Elena stood. “I’ll take over this part. I’ll do the…research.”
Her mother looked at her with raised eyebrows. “Are you sure you want to? It’s rather dull library stuff.”
“You think I can’t do it because it’s too intellectual for me?”
“Never. Of course you can. I’m a little surprised you’re volunteering.”
She knew very well her mother did not believe in her ability to dig up information on suicide methods but could not say so. She smiled. Mother was sometimes ridiculously easy to manipulate. Elena wanted to figure it out. She was pretty good at scouting out drugs, and she had connections for getting them without leaving a paper trail. “It’s a job I’m more than willing to take on.” She trusted herself more than Suzanne’s scruples in the situation.
Suddenly Suzanne crumpled. She sat at her desk with her head in her hands, weeping. Sobs wracked her. Elena was terrified for a moment. Suzanne never cried. She moved slowly toward her mother, hoping it would end as spontaneously as it had begun. Then awkwardly, tentatively, she put her arm around Suzanne and patted her back, feeling somewhat like a person afraid of horses attempting to quiet one.
Suzanne got herself back under control. When she could speak, she said softly, “It’s hard to explain. But all this means giving up. Giving up the fantasy that someday she and I would understand each other, would…have a better way of being together…. Don’t be upset, Elena, it’s just an old daydream of mine.”
“At least the two of us are doing better, Mother, don’t you think? That’s something neither of us expected, right? At least we have that.”
There were lots of nice ways of saying what they were talking about, ways people had invented to discuss a person offing themselves with words like tongs. One of Elena’s favorites was “self-deliverance,” which sounded like having a baby on your own. If she was amused by the language that went around death on tiptoe, she was matter-of-fact about gathering information. Chad had been sloppy in planning his own death. He had taken Evan with him, without Evan’s desire, simply because Chad had been out of control. If he had truly wanted to kill himself and only himself, the solution would have been to take the gun, lock himself in his room at home and use it, or walk into the desert alone and put the gun to his head. But he had not wanted to die alone. He had wanted company in his dying, for them to be with him and for them to die with him. For so many years, she had felt guilty that she had not shot herself or been shot. She had not been able to protect Evan. She
She went off to the public library and began to look for books on suicide, which proved irrelevant—endless statistics and stupid generalizations. Psychological profiles. Pontificating. Then she tried poison. That was more useful, although most ways sounded too painful.
In a big bookstore, she found a couple of books that were actually about helping people to die, or people offing themselves. She stood by the shelf reading them for a while before she decided the one to buy. She bought a couple of random books so that the bookstore employee would be less likely to remember her: an Italian cookbook and a book about all the various current psychological therapies. That she might actually read. The clerk was maybe twenty-two and paid no attention. She gave him cash.
She carried home her three books and sat down to read case histories of suicides, Let Me Die Before I Wake. Most of the people seemed to have cancer, but Grandma had the same right to decide she didn’t want to live. Grandma wanted to do it neatly. She hadn’t asked about Mother’s gun, which was a blessing. Elena could still see Chad with his head blasted open and the brains and blood spilling out. Shooting a person turned them into garbage.