THE LAST DAY

I honestly didn’t think I’d ever see you again.

(her looking forward)

I reserve the right to be mad, to be disappointed.  But I always love you.

(Pause)

It’s always at least 90% Love.

10% Hate?

There’s even love mixed into the hate somewhere.

So now?  This broken down old man in his broken down old house?

(She looked around, all the smells, all the failures piling up around him.  And the sickness, the ultimate failure of them all, the failure of the body.  Having to clean him after he’d soiled himself, yet again.  After all the sex jokes weren’t funny anymore.)

She felt a tear coming up, making it difficult to speak.

“A million percent.”

==

In the car, she felt the weight of the world.  A dream, like she was underwater, but the water had the thickness and density of steel.  She was not surprised by the sense of weight, or breathlessness, or even the sense that she had lost all feeling in her body.  There might not even be a body left to feel, and certainly no bit that she could find to wiggle. Surprisingly, there was no fear or pain.  

She focused on the hand in front of her, familiar yet unidentifiable.  Weathered, old, some blood of course.  His hand, maybe.  Still on a steering wheel.  Like it looked while gripping a guitar.  It shocked her to realize that it was hers.  There was an odd void at the edge of her shoulder and lots of blood around it.  The hand was attached to an arm that wasn’t attached to her any longer.

That’s when she knew.  And when she stopped fighting the blissful sleep that was calling to her.

Or maybe that was the music.

==

As soon as she left on her errands, “I’ll get your pills and try to make my 2 o’clock with the client.  So I should be back by 6, 7 at the latest. You sure you’ll be okay?”

Looking at the clock, he knew he’d have 10 hours at most. No time to spare.  He used all his energy to crawl to the bathroom cabinet where he had been hoarding his pills.

“Enough to kill a horse,” she had said.

He wondered if she knew.  Or if she suspected.  He hated to do this to her.  To leave her to clean up yet another of his messes.  But at least she would know how to set things in order.  She’d be happy to go through all the memorabilia, disperse his “estate”.  He wondered yet again, if she’d think of the Farmhouse & Barn as a burden or a treasure.  He included a suggestion, but not a requirement, in the will for her to make it into a concert center.  She’d like that. Hosting musicians as she got older.  Maybe she’d find someone to replace him.

Purpose, that’s what he’d be leaving her.

He got out his sealed bottle of whisky from 1981.

“To be used in extreme emergency!” it said in his 1981 handwriting.

To wash down the pills, he thought.  Plus, if I cut it with water, I won’t get sick.

But as a precaution, he had a filtered jug of water next to him.

After all these years of not drinking, he didn’t trust his body to not betray him.

Again.