As soon as I woke I called Pamela. Hadn’t spoken to her, since she began having trouble staying on the phone. Now she tells me her two friends finally arranged hospice at home, even though she was alone, which is what she wants, to be alone. You’re supposed to have round the clock care when you’re alone at home, in hospice.
She was supposed to die before Mark, her husband and my dear friend. Why did she survive him, she asks me and the universe. He feels the same way I tell her, he wanted to take care of you until the end.
In our conversation, there were moments she made sounds like an animal, whether it was gasping for breath or sobbing or vomiting I do not know. I waited when it happened. Held a lot of silence as she made her way.
The morphine is in the refrigerator, for her unreachable.
Life and death was the major topic of the day. Why not always? Why don’t we realize that in every moment we limn the boundary between the two, the membrane that thins and thickens with the beat of the heart. In every moment, cells die and are born. In every moment there is a breath, a taking in and letting go.
She says she wants to die, to have Mark come and get her. But between words I hear something that’s not ready, like she’s hanging on to the cliff by a twig. Maybe more like being in the deep ocean, - its waves heaving us in directions outside our control, breaking down the resolve to live, to die, to be separate, in this lifetime or another.
I am not ready to let her go, and in some way Mark’s presence, in my life.
I have to get out of my bathrobe and go.
Many details leap out at me...the morphine out of reach. The unintelligible sounds that the narrator patiently accommodates. The connection to Pamela being part of the narrator's connection to Mark who was clearly very important to them both. And the picking up on the shred of Pamela's hesitation to cross the threshold. Much here.
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