Us by Michael Kimball Page B

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