Stella Dawson

       The house was very quiet the night Mary died. Her two German Shepherds had stopped entering her room, even the older dog who slept at Mary's feet throughout her long illness had left her sentinel post: dogs have an uncanny way of knowing. It was past midnight. Mary’s breathing was ragged and urgent at first, the rattle grasping at her throat, ghastly, until slowly, slowly, the pauses grew longer and longer, interminably long. I climbed into bed beside her and held her unconscious body throughout the long death. A quiet filled the room between each breath, I held her body, waiting, a sudden, deep inhalation, a heaving breath, an elongated pause, a slow exhalation, until the dawn broke, and at long last, a last long deep breath escaped her. 

​

      Mary had known she was dying for four years. When I came home from work one humid day, hot and sweaty from cycling through Rock Creek Park, Mary had taken my hand and led me to the living room. Her German Shepherd dog Adina followed. She sat me down on the leather sofa and took both my hands in hers. Adina lay down beside us. It was early evening, the September light softening.

​

        “I had an x-ray today. The radiologist left me an urgent message and I called him back.  He told me to see a gynecologist immediately.”  

​

         The floor tilted. “A tumor?  The last one was benign. It probably will be fine.” 

         

         “No. Not this time.” Mary held my hands tight, her onyx eyes black pools of knowing that pulled me into hers. Her voice was low and firm. “We are going to do this well, and when the time comes, I want to take medications to die.”

​

         My vision blurred. I held her hand tight and breathed into her strength, unsurprised by the calm of this woman who seized each moment of life with the utmost ferocity. I took her into my arms and held her tight, and I made a promise. “We will do this together.” 

​

        We held each other strong and firm as we had for over 33 years, holding tight for whatever was yet to come, for what time we had left. We kept on holding for four long years, through six hours of surgery that cut her from sternum to pubic bone, splaying her innards onto the operating table and stitching her back together with 47 industrial-sized staples, through 53 rounds of dense-dose chemotherapy, through three different chemo regimes, through round after round of red blood pumped into her veins to keep her going, and through the garish light of midnight emergency room visits; and we kept strong through the search for deadly pills, ricocheting around the world from China, Mexico, Peru, and mismatched stockpiles of leftover medications, and the last resort, a reservation at a clinic in Switzerland; we veered across the world, searching for a way for Mary to die on her terms, all the while she trained her German Shepherds, until we returned home, and we knocked on doors of the Washington, DC, council members, and of politicians on Capitol Hill, she gave interviews, press conferences, hearings, all under the glare of TV lights, where everyone asked her the same question: “Tell us why you want to die.”  

​

       “I don’t want to die. I am doing everything in my power to live. It is the cancer that is killing me. I want to live each moment that I can, and I want to have agency over what little time remains.” 

 

        Until she changed the law in the nation’s capital, and the day came when Mary ran into my study, shaking in front of her a brown paper bag, urging me to end my phone call, willing me to celebrate: She had succeeded, she had the prescription, at last the fatal medications, the instructions pinned to the front of the brown paper bag at which I dared not look.

​

     “I’ve got them, I’ve got them! The pharmacy dispensed them.” 

 

      She had won, I felt sick, and when the time came, I was unprepared. I never read the instructions pinned to the bag, never looked inside to check the pills she had fought so hard to obtain. I knew her time was shortening. Her belly was grossly swollen, fluids would no longer drain from the stent inserted into her abdomen, the surgeon said he could do nothing more, she was falling out of bed, made dizzy by pain medications that no longer controlled the pain eyes were tinged with yellow, her feet were getting cold, her organs shutting down. I should have known we were almost done. I would never be ready. 

​

      I told her I didn't know how I could disentangle my roots from hers. She listened, she looked at me, her eyes the melting depths I had fallen into three decades before, rivers of lava in brown and black that matched the shining auburn of her hair. She did not say anything. She did not say much about death in those last days. She was calm, she read and rested and walked and trained her two dogs until she could do no more.  I told her in those last days that I felt like the giant oaks of Peter Wohlenben’s book The Secret Life of Trees, how we had grown together, deeply entwined, our branches shading, supporting and nourishing each other, sending messages of survival and sustenance through mycorrhizal networks, protecting each other from the vicissitudes of living. “The trees don’t want to take anything away from each other,” Wohlenben wrote. “Such partners are often so tightly connected at the roots that sometimes they even die together.”

    

        It was shortly after midnight when the time came, no other sounds in the house, the dogs asleep in another room, they never stirred. Mary woke and she said to me, “It is time.”  ..................