The house was very quiet the night Mary died. Her 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. It was past midnight. Mary’s breathing was ragged and urgent at first, the rattle ghastly, grasping at her throat, until slowly, slowly, the pauses between each breath grew 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, an elongated pause, a slow exhalation, again and again and again, until dawn broke and at long last, a last long deep breath. 

 

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

 

      “I had an x-ray today. The radiologist called. He told me to see a gynecologist immediately.”

 

       Sounds stopped. The floor tilted.

​

       “A tumor? The last one was benign.”

​

       “No. Not this time.”

​

        Mary held my hands tight, her onyx eyes black pools of knowing. 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.”

 

        I held her hand tight and breathed 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.  We held each other strong and firm as we had for the last 33 years, traveling together, changing jobs and careers, holding tight for whatever was yet to come, for whatever time was 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 alive, and through the garish light of midnight emergency rooms; 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 death 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 nation's capital in Washington, DC, the council members, and then the politicians on Capitol Hill, and Mary 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, willing me to celebrate, 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!" She had won.

 

       I felt sick, and when the time came, I was unprepared. I never read the instructions pinned to that brown paper 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, dizzied by pain, numbed by medications that no longer controlled the pain, eyes tinged yellow, feet getting cold, stomach blocked, 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 that shifted from black to brown and matched the shining auburn of her hair. She did not say anything. She did not say much 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 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.” I pushed aside the pillows that cushioned her when she fell from her bed in delirium. I helped her rise and took her by the arm; I guided her to the bathroom. She had trouble walking.

 

       Alone, I entered her art studio. The brown paper bag was stuffed in a photography cabinet, on top of a jumble of camera lenses, cables, cassettes, CDs, photo negatives and boxes of old tapes, each one labeled by project in her spiky handwriting. I ripped off the instructions stapled to the front of the pharmacy bag and took out two bottles. One had four anti-nausea pills, another was filled with powder, the fatal dose of Seconal. I unfolded the sheets of pharmacological instructions and spread them on the table in front of me. My hands shook. The words wobbled and fell away, disintegrating before me. I could feel my mind fragment into a thousand different shards that shattered across the room. How many pills? How long should she wait? When should she swallow the potion? What if I get this wrong? Bile in my mouth, the room began to sway, the walls to cave. I was clinging to bare rock, fingers bleeding, trying to hold on, toes seeking a solid foothold, a sheer cliff. I cannot look down. I cannot look into the void. I clung on, fingers aching, heart racing. I scanned the walls around me here in her studio. I forced myself to focus. The cratering walls began to steady, and there on the walls I found her artwork, bold works of text and images, her refusal to be silenced or be defined by others, to be rubbed out, her work that spoke of claiming oneself in face of erasure, how she inverted otherness into victory, and I breathed into the strength of her determination to give voice to those unheard, to find words in pain.

 

       The letters on the printed pages reassembled into words, the words into sentences, and the sentences into instructions on the sheets of paper before me. I read them, helped Mary back to bed and went downstairs. The dogs looked up from their beds but did not move, they stayed away at the end. I reached into the kitchen cabinet and chose two porcelain cups from England rimmed in gold, each decorated in a delicate lattice of green and red. Into one I mixed the white Seconal powder; it would not dissolve but remained suspended. Into the other, I poured the cranberry juice, a chaser to disguise the bitter taste. I could not look down. I went upstairs. We sat on the edge of the bed and held hands.

 

      “I’d like to wear your happy shirt,” Mary said.

 

       Her cheeks were hollow, eyes sunken. I pulled from her closet a brightly colored shirt she had bought at the beach the month before.

 

       “No, your blue one. The one with birds flying across it from the wildlife refuge.”

 

       I found the T-shirt with chickadees. Mary strapped onto her wrist the watch she always wore to cover a scar. 

       

        “We must say something first.” I cannot remember her words. I cannot recall mine. I stumbled over whatever it was that I tried to say, words a poor refuge in face of death.............