Us

by Michael Kimball

  I turned the water off and pulled the shower curtain back. I stepped out of the bathtub and held onto her arms so that she could step out of the bathtub too. I held the bath towel out in my arms for her and she stepped out into it. I stepped back and she held her arms out so that I could dry them off for her.

  I wrapped the bath towel around her legs and patted them down with it until they were dry too. Her skin was too dry. There was dead skin on her arms and her legs and her back and her face. We had to peel all of it off her so that she wouldn’t die any faster than she already was.

  I hung her bath towel up on the towel rack and dried myself off with another bath towel. I helped her step into her underwear and pulled them up her legs. I helped her get her arms through her bra straps and hooked her bra together in the back. I helped her push her arms through the sleeves of her housecoat and zipped it all the way up to her neck.

  We walked her over to her dressing table so that she could sit down on her chair at her dressing table. She wanted to brush her hair out. She could hold onto the hairbrush for a few brushstrokes, but then her arm would get too tired. Her hair was almost dry by the time that she was done brushing it out.

  I walked back into the bathroom and got her walker back out for her. She walked down the hallway and into the kitchen with it and I walked behind her. I pulled a kitchen chair out from the kitchen table for her and she sat down to eat.

  Nobody had brought any trays of hospital food into our bedroom, but there wasn’t any bread or fruit or milk or anything else fresh in our house either. We were going to have to feed ourselves things that didn’t get too old too fast.

  I got a box of dry cereal down from the cupboard. I got spoons out of the silverware drawer and cereal bowls down from another cupboard. I filled the bowls up with cereal and I waited for her to start to eat first. I watched her put the spoon in the bowl and then bring the spoon up to her mouth. I watched her chew and swallow the food and then I did it with her too.

  I put the cereal bowls and the spoons into the kitchen sink and rinsed some water over them. I sat back down at the kitchen table with her and we looked around the kitchen. We looked at her walker and we looked at each other. We knew that it didn’t matter what or how much we ate. We knew that we wouldn’t be alive and be together for much longer.

  How We Slowed Our Time Down

  We found ways to make our days longer. We followed the sun around our house—from our bedroom and the bathroom in the morning, to the kitchen through noon, the living room through the afternoon, and the dining room for the evening.

  At night, we turned all the lights in every room of our house on. We turned the lights on the front porch on. We turned the lights on the back porch and over the garage on too. We wanted to keep the darkness that surrounded our house and us as far away from us as we could.

  We wanted it to be daytime all the time. We didn’t need much sleep anymore anyway. She had saved so much of it up while she was sleeping in the hospital and I wanted to be awake for the rest of the time that she was going to be alive.

  We unplugged all the clocks and anything that had a clock on it. We used our extra time awake to slow the rest of our time down. We cooked and ate and sat and talked and waited and moved and walked and we did it all slowed down. There wasn’t anything else that we wanted to do but be awake and alive with each other.

  How I Rubbed Her Wrinkles Out

  I would rub her back and her arms and her legs and her feet. My hands could rub the wrinkles out of her skin and make her feel younger, so that she could stay alive longer. We were trying to stretch the rest of our lives out.

  Some of the Things that She Couldn’t Do Anymore

  We were afraid to close our eyes to go to sleep so we stayed awake for those days that we were back at home. We tried not to look away from each other too much or even blink and we did other things to help us stay awake too. We kept touching each other on the arm or the hair or the face. We kept sitting up or getting up and standing up. We kept setting this egg timer that we had so that it would keep going off and keep us up too.

  We ate to stay alive and awake too. We ate all the food inside the cupboards and the pantry and all the food inside the refrigerator and the freezer. We ate everything that we had that was in boxes and jars and bottles and cans and plastic bags. We ate boxes of cereal, cans of fruit and cans of soup, bags of frozen vegetables, and packages of frozen meat. We ate packages of cookies, boxes of crackers, and bags of potato chips.

  We boiled water to make coffee and tea and to cook boxes of pasta and bags of rice. We defrosted frozen orange juice and frozen lemonade and drank it from pitchers. We baked layer cakes and loaves of bread with the flour and the sugar that was left in the jars on top of the kitchen counter and with the packages of yeast that made it all rise up.

  All of it was food that didn’t get too old too fast. But it took us a long time to get up and get to the kitchen to make our food, to sit down and eat our breakfast and our lunch and our supper, to get back up and clean up the pots and pans and the dishes and the silverware and to put everything away again. We moved through our house and our lives so slowly then.

  But my wife wasn’t getting any better anymore for those days that we were back at home. She began to forget how to live in our house or with me anymore. She forgot what things were or what they were for. We made labels for the refrigerator and the food inside it, for the doors to the kitchen and our bedroom and the bathrooms, for the things that she used in the bathroom, and for the couch and the chairs and the other places where she could sit down. We wrote instructions out for the things that we used around our house—the telephone and the television, the microwave oven and the stove, the toilet and the sinks.

  But she still tried to dial the telephone on the touch pad of the microwave oven and put her dirty clothes away inside the dishwasher. Sometimes she sat down on a chair and peed on the cushion and other times she would throw trash away in the clothes hamper.

  We moved through the rooms of our house slowly so that I could show her what things were. We turned doorknobs to open doors up and looked into the different rooms of our house to show her what they were for. We turned water faucets on and off. We turned the coffee maker, the lamps, the television, and all the other appliances on and off too.

  She was still surprised that turning a switch on made the ceiling fan turn on or made the living room fill up with light. She was still surprised when she heard somebody’s voice through the telephone, or when the people on the television started talking or the voices on the radio started talking or singing. She forgot more and more about our house and us until she couldn’t always remember my name or why I was helping her get up or eat and then she forgot how to stand up or open her mouth up or say my name or move her arms.

  She couldn’t get up out of her chair for our walk across the living room to the dining room with her walker. I couldn’t help her enough so that she could do it either. So I brought a small table from our spare bedroom out to her in the living room and set it down around her legs. I brought her food out to her too and set it down on the small table in front of her.

  It was still too hard for her to sit up and she couldn’t lean forward either. Her head had gotten too heavy for her neck and it would fall back against the headrest of her chair and her mouth would fall open a little bit. I would sit down next to her to hold her head up for her so that I could feed her food with a spoon. She couldn’t open her mouth very much anymore and she could only chew slowly, but we still had all those long meals together. She would smile as much as she could after she had chewed and swallowed her food.

  How Our House Had Gotten Too Old Too

  Our house had gotten too old and started to die too. The paint was peeling off it so that the wood was showing through in places. The wood had gotten soft in places too and there were too many moldy age spots growing on it to replace it.

  Some of the shingles had come off the roof and I would find them in the bushes around o
ur house and scattered around the front yard and the backyard too. There were cracks in the windowpanes and the drafty wind that came through them made us feel as if we were back in the cold air of the hospital.

  There were also cracks in the ceilings and in the walls. Our house was settling down on its foundation after all those years that we had lived inside it. Our house had started leaking too—through the roof and the ceiling, but also through the basement walls where there were cracks in the foundation. There were water marks on the ceilings and the walls and our house never dried out.

  We had roofers and builders and a handyman come out to look at our house, but none of them thought that it should be fixed. They all said that our house was too old and that too much of it needed to be replaced. They didn’t say that we shouldn’t keep living in it, but they were afraid that part of the roof or the ceiling might fall down on us. They were afraid that our house might flood in a heavy rain and that the foundation might be washed away.

  But we couldn’t see any sky or anything else except for darkness through any of the cracks in the ceiling and we didn’t worry too much about too much rain. We wanted to float away from all of this anyway.

  What the Doctor Said that She Needed

  My wife moved less and got worse, but she didn’t want to go back to the hospital. I got her to go to a doctor, but she couldn’t walk enough with her walker to get out to our car and I couldn’t lift her up to carry her that far either. She didn’t want me to call an ambulance again, so I tried to think of ways to move her.

  I thought of things that would roll. I had a wheelbarrow out in the garden and a dolly out in the garage, but she wouldn’t have let me help her get in or on either one of those. So I rolled an old desk chair out of our guest bedroom and into the living room. I helped her move from the seat of the living room chair to the seat of the desk chair without her needing to stand up. I raised the seat of the desk chair up so that her feet didn’t touch the floor or catch in its wheels. I turned the desk chair on its swivel, held onto the armrests, and pushed her across the living room floor, through the kitchen, and out the back door.

  I rolled her down the back walk and around to the passenger side of our car. I helped her slide out of the desk chair and into the seat of the car. I buckled her in, closed her car door, and rolled the desk chair away from our car so that I wouldn’t hit it when I backed our car out of the driveway.

  The people in the doctor’s office brought a wheelchair out to our car so that my wife could get across the parking lot and into the doctor’s office. I signed my wife in and we waited in the waiting room. There were other people there who were dying too and we had to wait for them to go first. We waited for them to call my wife’s name and then we waited in the examination room.

  The nurse helped my wife take all her clothes off. I folded them up and held them in my lap. The nurse helped my wife put a hospital gown on that was cut open down the back and that had little ties on it to hold it together.

  The nurse helped my wife get up and lie down on top of the table with the paper stretched over it. It crinkled and ripped when she moved. We talked to the nurse and answered her questions and then we waited for the nurse to come back into the examination room with the doctor.

  The doctor told us that she just needed to sleep more. But we told him that we had become afraid of our bedroom and our bed and afraid of sleep. But the doctor told us that she needed to keep taking her pills to keep from having any more seizures and that she needed to take some other pills for sleep.

  The doctor told us that she needed to go back to the hospital, but he let us go back to our house. We drove from the doctor’s office to the drug store to get her prescriptions filled and get her some other things that we thought might help her.

  We bought her pills to reduce pain, to maintain her immune system, to improve her memory, to keep her body tissue from shrinking, and to keep her heart and her lungs healthy enough so that she could feel and breathe. We bought her pills for her joints so that she could move her arms and her hands more and straighten her knees out enough to stand up again. We bought her skin cream to rub the wrinkles out of her skin. We bought her everything else that we could find that might help us keep her alive.

  How We Practiced for Her Death

  My wife only lived in the living room after we got back home again. I kept thinking that might somehow help keep her alive. We were afraid that if we moved her to anywhere else that she might die, so my wife stayed on the couch in the living room and did the rest of her living there. She slept there and I slept next to her on the floor.

  I brought her vitamins and her other pills to take. I put her pills on her tongue and tipped the lip of a glass of water over her bottom lip so that she could swallow them. I fed her food with a spoon and waited for her to chew and swallow. I cleaned the extra food off her lips and her chin with the spoon and then with a napkin after she couldn’t eat any more food. I gathered her bottles of pills and the food dishes all up and took them back into the kitchen.

  But none of the food that she ate or the pills that she took helped her feel or get any better. We called the doctor up, but he said that he couldn’t help her anymore unless we took her back to the hospital. But I couldn’t take her back there or think of any other way to help her anymore. She couldn’t get up to walk anywhere even with her walker and she couldn’t move or talk much anymore either. She didn’t want to live as little as she was then, only sitting up or lying down.

  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.

  Why We Both Took Her Sleeping Pills

  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.

  Hold onto Me

  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.<
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  How I Tried to Get Her Back

  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.