I took a deep breath. “Are you certain there’s no pain?”
“Believe me,” he said, “I saw enough people die horrible deaths in the war. I wouldn’t ever want to inflict that kind of pain on anyone. This is the most peaceful passing you could give your mom—if she needs that help.”
I glanced toward Mama’s bedroom, wondering if I’d ever seriously think of using them. At the same time, nothing in me wanted to give the bottle back.
“Thank you,” I said.
“Of course,” Dr. Edelman said. He put his hand on my shoulder. “You need to make sure no one knows, and that no one gets into the bottle accidentally. Keep it in the freezer until you need it.”
“Do they expire?”
“Apparently not,” Dr. Edelman said. “I’ve had these for years. You’ll know they’re working because they kill the virus that causes moles and warts. They clear up age spots and other blemishes, as well.”
“Wish I’d had them for my acne when I was a teenager,” I said, trying to cut the tension.
Dr. Edelman smiled. “I know it seems like you’re playing God,” he said. “But we play God every day when we give people medications or surgeries to keep them alive. Sometimes the more loving thing is to let them go.”
I nodded, aware of how cold the bottle felt in my hand. “Thank you,” I said again.
“Let me know if you need anything,” Dr. Edelman said. He put the empty cooler back in his black bag, turned the clasp closed, and left.
DAY THREE
This morning I woke up with a tingling sensation in my feet. It didn’t last long, but I sat up in bed, swung my feet over the side, and massaged them. It’s not a feeling I’ve ever had before, and like every little sensation in my body now, I’m wondering if it’s the pearls at work. The thought doesn’t make me unhappy. In fact, just the opposite. There’s a little exhilaration. A quickening, a feeling that I’m coming closer to what I’ve wanted for a long, long time, even though I’d never considered taking the pearls before.
The tingling didn’t last long. By the time I got up, wound the clock, fed the cats, and watered the flowers, I didn’t notice it anymore, and it hasn’t come back. A good thing, too, since I had plenty to do today, getting started on the long list I posted on the refrigerator door last night.
I’ve been a chronic list-maker my whole life. It gives me some illusion that my life is under control or I can foresee the immediate future. Whenever my mind starts feeling like the desk catch-all drawer—a scattered mess of paper clips, broken rulers, and old pens—writing things down makes me feel like I’ve cleared out the clutter, at least momentarily. Sometimes I’ve written Take a shower or Brush teeth on the list just so I can feel productive. I’ve even added items to the list after I’ve done them so I could cross them off.
Joe used to tease me about my obsessiveness, adding his own notes to my list when I wasn’t around. Open eyes when you wake up in the morning, he wrote one time. Breathe in. Breathe out. Or Crack eggs before scrambling them.
“Very funny,” I told him one day after breakfast when I discovered his latest notes.
“Just trying to help,” he said, smiling. He started backing out of the room, expecting me to chase him with the spatula I was holding.
“Oh,” he said, “and don’t forget to take off the gas cap before you fuel up the car.” Then he turned and sprinted out the door. Next thing I knew he and Rose were laughing and chasing each other out in the yard, and Cricket was barking to high heaven.
* * *
I’ve never made a list like this before. It’s all the things I need to do in the next seventeen days. The house needs a good cleaning, but not just surface stuff. I want to get rid of all the excess items so Holly won’t have to go through them after I’m gone. Old clothes, old papers, stacks of books, extra plates and dishes.
I’ll leave what’s left of Mama’s things, but anything that belongs to me will find a new home. I remember what a huge job Holly and I had after Mama died. Days of sorting and making piles, taking truckloads to Goodwill, packing up boxes for Holly to take back to Seattle, pitching stuff or burning old papers in the burn barrel out back.
“I’m never buying another thing,” I said to Holly while we sorted. “We’ve all got enough for three lifetimes.” Holly felt the same way, but some items were too precious to give up. She shipped home a cut-glass vase that Mama and Daddy received as a wedding gift and a painted plate that Mama used for serving her famous coconut cake when we were little.
My intention is to make my passing as quiet and easy for everyone else as it is for me. Stirring the pearls into my yogurt certainly was simple enough, like eating a bowl of ice cream with topping. I intend for the rest of the seventeen days to be just as simple—and for the days afterward, with Holly taking care of things, to be equally so. I can’t tell anyone what I’ve done or I’ll set off a chain reaction of panic and trying to find a way to reverse the effect of the pearls. But I can make it easy for my sister after I’m gone.
I tried to calculate when the passing might happen on the twentieth day. If Dr. Edelman was right, I’d pass at about 3:30 a.m. Just go to bed early that night and not wake up. Somehow I’ll need to arrange for someone to find me. Another thing for the list. Ask someone to come over on the twenty-first day. Not an easy thing for anyone to do, but better than waiting until Nancy wonders why I never came back to work.
In all the to-do lists I’d ever made, I had never expected to write, Arrange for someone to find my body.
But what if the pearls work faster? Slower? Or not at all? They were years old, after all. I guess in that way, my situation is not so different from how we ordinarily live and die. We don’t know exactly when the end will come.
If the pearls work, I have seventeen days to get my life in order once and for all. I find a certain peace in that. No big ambitions or goals. No bucket list with items to be crossed off. I’m not going to try to wedge in a hot air balloon ride and a trip to Nepal.
My bucket list is more about a cleaning bucket. What can I clear up and get rid of? What can I wash down and spruce up?
Just drag all the old and broken refuse of life off to the dump and recycling center, redeem my soda cans and wine bottles, delete the old e-mails on my computer, and make sure my financial affairs are in order.
I wouldn’t take the time to do this for myself. But I’ll do it for Holly. I don’t want her to deal with a mess once I’m gone.
So here’s my “bucket” list:
• Clean out the refrigerator and freezers (defrost the chest freezer)
• Get rid of junk in the shed
• Check in with friends and neighbors
• Organize photos
• Delete old e-mails
• Go through the basement storage room
• Organize all financial paperwork and make a list of account numbers and passwords
• Review my will
• Throw out old toiletries and cleaning supplies
• Take clothes to Goodwill
• Clean out the glove compartment
• Sweep out the garage
• Pare down old books and magazines—take them to the library
After I wrote out the list, I pulled the Animal Rescue League calendar out of the kitchen drawer and hung it on the wall. I marked red Xs on the last couple of days, counted out to twenty, and circled that date.
August 28.
I took in a little breath of air. That was the day I met Joe, all those many years ago.
* * *
It’s hard to believe how life sneaks up on you and accumulates until you don’t even know how buried you are in the past, how much it encroaches on the present, and squeezes all the energy out of it.
I started cleaning the closets and drawers, which seemed less intimidating than the attic and shed. Usually I’d use the trinity plan to sort things: Pitch, Donate, or Sell. But I eliminated the Sell because there’s no need. Either something has value and I’ll
take it to Goodwill, or it has fulfilled its purpose and it’s time to let go.
As I went through the closets, I wished I could have always been this decisive. The coatdress from Cousin Georgia’s wedding thirteen years ago? Gone. The boots with the heels I could never walk in? Gone. No more second-guessing myself, thinking I might wake up one day and regret getting rid of the embroidered Christmas sweater with a big chenille pom-pom for Rudolph’s nose.
Then I got to Mama’s clothes. There aren’t a lot of them, but I couldn’t bring myself to give them all away when she died. Her garden pants. Her flowered robe. Everyone knew Mama as the Flower Lady. At the height of her gardening days, her flower beds were legendary. In June, an entire bed of purple larkspur and coral-pink gaillardia filled the space next to the shed, attracting strangers who came just to stand and stare. The colors were so vibrant, it seemed as though Mama had planted varieties of her own making.
The visitors had the same look on their faces that Joe and I had when we went to New York years ago and came face-to-face with a real van Gogh painting. I remember the feeling of reverence, and how I could see the colors of van Gogh’s flowers reflected in Joe’s face as he drank them in.
Every year for Memorial Day, the peonies on the south side of Mama’s house were so fragrant you could smell them as soon as you stepped out on the porch. And in the fall, the brown-eyed Susans and autumn clematis filled up the bed. The clematis, with its tiny white blooms growing up Mama’s trellis, looked like something a bride would wear as a veil.
Mama started entering flowers in the State Fair at the age of thirteen, and she never stopped except when she judged the floral competition. In the attic years ago, I found three huge boxes of ribbons she’d won. Before her dementia started to advance, I asked her what she’d like to have done with them, and she waved away the question like it didn’t matter.
“Oh, all those ribbons,” she said. “The ribbons don’t matter much . . . never did. The important part was growing the flowers and somehow being a part of all that beauty. And entering them in the competition felt like a way to share them. Those ribbons are no tribute to my talent.... They’re about what nature can do.”
I’ll let Holly decide what to do with them, but I put a note on one of the boxes that they could be donated to the State Fair for their archives. Mama brought so much beauty to this world; she deserves to live on.
* * *
I walked down to the mailbox to get the mail after I watered the flowers for the second time today. The corners of two envelopes stuck out from the rest. One was a bank statement, the other the gas bill. Won’t have to worry about these much longer, I thought as I walked back up the gravel lane toward the house.
Inside, I added notes to my bucket list: Pay all bills, bring everything up-to-date, organize my records so that when Holly comes to settle things after I’m gone, it will be as easy on her as possible.
I sat down at the kitchen table, kicked off my sandals, put one leg up under me, and wiped away the condensation on the glass of iced tea I’d poured. I glanced through the rest of the mail, stopping when I came to a nondescript white envelope. The handwriting was almost as familiar as my own. A note from Joe.
It didn’t really surprise me. I tore it open and pulled out a simple card picturing a watercolor of wildflowers. Thinking of you, it said. Inside, he’d written, I know this is a hard time of year.
Joe always sends a card around the time of Mama’s passing. It’s a sweet gesture. I suppose he does it for the same reason he came to her funeral. “I thought of her as my mama, too, you know.”
He used to spend hours helping her in the barn, which she called the “international headquarters” for her antiques and furniture repair business. She was a self-taught seamstress, upholsterer, refinisher, and woodworker.
Daddy had left behind a workbench full of tools, and Mama had learned the value of making do from her own mother. Those assets, along with the necessity of feeding two daughters, were enough to prompt a business that kept the mortgage and dental bills paid until Holly and I went to college.
* * *
Mama did yoga before anyone else around here had heard of it. Too old to be a hippie, she was an earth mother, an early adopter of lentil casseroles and bean sprouts that she grew in old Mason jars on the top of our refrigerator.
Her workshop for the antiques business smelled of turpentine and wood stain, a combination both pungent and sweet. When she was refinishing a piece of furniture that had seen better days, she wore a carpenter’s apron with a pocket across the front for her tools. Each day when she took off the apron, she shook out the sawdust, snapping it just like our sheets used to snap in the wind on the clothesline, and hung it on a hook by the door.
Often when she stood by a table or chest of drawers, brushing stain across the velvety sanded surface, she adopted the yoga Tree Pose, holding one foot up against the opposite leg with perfect balance. She was so steady that she could switch from one leg to the other without the slightest bobble. She did this when she cooked, too, if she stood at the stove for a long time, stirring a cream soup or a batch of fudge.
Mama even—and this embarrasses and inspires me yet today—created her own walking Tree Pose while she was cooking or tidying up around the house. She stood with one foot up. Put it down. Took a step. Put the other foot up. Put it down. She could vacuum the entire house that way without missing a beat.
We called her the Ostrich. And we told no one. No one could know this odd and wonderful secret about our mom.
Of course, Joe found out. The first time he saw her do the ostrich walk, he laughed so hard he literally doubled over. “Lillian, you are a wonder,” he said when he finally composed himself. “Will you teach me how to do it?”
We spent a lot of Saturdays at Mama’s after we were married. I’d tend to the yard work while Joe helped her build legs for a tabletop she found by the side of the road or flip over a couch so she could finish tacking its skirt in place.
They’d listen to Cubs games and Cyclone games and whatever else was in season. And they’d feed carrots to Romeo, the docile horse Mama started boarding as another source of income when we were in high school.
Romeo’s owners came to our house just often enough to keep him happy. Then, when they moved away, they sold him to Mama for almost nothing, along with a trailer, bridle, and saddle. Holly and I were never horse crazy, but we were glad Mama had Romeo to talk to when Joe wasn’t around.
Mama always said she loved Joe like a son. He’d give her a big bear hug whenever we saw her, and he filled that hole that had been gaping open for so many years since Daddy died.
“Lillian,” he’d say, “you’re the mom I always wished I had.” He considered her “one of his girls,” just like Rose and me.
Mama had a hard time when we got divorced. She never said much about it because she knew how much pain I was in, but she blamed me, I know. And rightly so.
* * *
I’ve never been in love with anyone else. I couldn’t imagine starting a relationship with someone new. I dated occasionally after Mama passed away, but I’ve always been dismal at small talk, and I learned pretty quickly that most men got tense if I talked honestly about my life.
Joe and I were always so comfortable together. Even after all these years, that’s what I remember. After our divorce, going out with a man who felt like a stranger and asking about his work and his hobbies felt exhausting. I came home feeling lonelier than I already was.
Joe and I met in college two weeks into my junior year. He worked in the student union café serving greasy french fries and Folgers coffee. I went there every Tuesday and Thursday after my horticulture lab and sat at the same table in a corner that smelled of old textbooks. I never could tolerate chaos, but at this time of the morning the place was quiet, and it made me feel connected to people after spending time with the plants.
I’d noticed Joe from a distance before. His sandy hair, slim build, the way he lingered at students�
� tables after delivering their food to ask if they needed anything else. He didn’t hurry. I marveled at his peculiar combination of effortlessness and efficiency.
He’d never waited on me before. But when I looked up from my plant identification book, there he stood with a pot of coffee in his hand, his eyes so much bluer than they seemed from a distance.
“Would you like a refill?” he asked. “It’s a fresh pot. I made it myself.”
“Sure,” I said, noticing his name tag. Joe Mitchell. “Do you do the cooking and serving?” I asked.
“Sometimes,” he said. “Depends on whether the regular cook partied too much the night before.”
“Oh,” I said, opening a packet of sugar and stirring it into my mug. “So you’re the one they can count on.”
“Guess so,” he said, smiling. “Let me know if you need anything else, okay?”
It didn’t take long for me to figure out I needed him. From that day on, he made a point of waiting on me, and every time, our conversations grew. He was a senior, an engineering major. He’d interned with the state during the summer, working on bridges and a new dam.
I didn’t need to hear much more before I felt myself falling. Even though I was little when Daddy died, his legacy of making things lived on in me. An artist or dreamer held no attraction. I needed a man who knew how to fix and build and repair. I searched for it without even knowing.
Joe knew how to build our relationship. He proposed to me on a camping trip in Minnesota, when we were in a canoe out in the middle of a lake. We sat in the light of the moon, listening to the loons calling and the water gently lapping around our oars. “You’re my best friend,” he said. “Would you do me the honor of being my wife?”
I felt a surge of joy as big as the night sky when he put the ring on my finger. Then we almost capsized the canoe when he leaned over to kiss me.
He knew how to make me laugh, even after the third miscarriage, when we almost gave up on having children.
And he knew how to be the father to Rose that I’d always wanted. But after she was gone, it seemed that our marriage was held together by death rather than life.
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