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Pills and Other Necessities

Deirdre Fagan

    The kettle is whistling. I reach for our cups; I am making tea for Irma and me. Her mug is the one that reads: “I like poetry, long walks on the beach, and poking dead things with a stick.” She bought it while we were on vacation and I can still hear the roar that escaped her lips in that campy Five-and-Dime. She had stood before me in her bathing suit, moist with sea water, a Hawaiian print skirt wrapped around her then very slender waist (I had marveled at her waist since I had never learned to tie anything around mine so that it would stay put and also because my own waist hadn’t been that small since I was twelve), sand still dotting the tops of her feet, facing a rotating rack. Head back, wide mouthed, she had laughed while I watched her in profile. Then she had whipped her head around and flashed me a grin as she read the mug out loud with glee, grasping it in her hands with the sort of familiarity one has with a mug one has been drinking morning coffee from for years. That mug was hers before she had purchased it in the same way that I was hers before we had met.
    My mug Irma had bought for me one holiday as a joke, and her jokes had a funny way of sticking. It was partly the way they were often based on truths that few were willing to admit, let alone say. Mine read: “Talk to the brains of this operation, she’s right over there,” and it had an arrow. Of course, since the mug was round it was hard to tell which way the arrow was pointing and it seemed to be pointing right back to the saying, which suggested that the person holding the mug ought to be a woman and that the mug owner was actually complimenting not diminishing herself. This is partly what Irma loved about it – she loved double entendres. Half the joy of everything came from double meanings, substitutions, and innuendo. In my case the mug meant that Irma’s morning routine was to debate on which side of me she needed to sit in order for the mug to mean what she had intended. Some jokes never get old.
    I pour the hot water over the chamomile bag in Irma’s mug and the black tea bag in mine, and then I shuffle into the sunroom. My mug has three shots of Gosling’s Old Rum waiting at the bottom. It is early, only 6 a.m., and the sun is just beginning to shine through the shady oaks behind our house. It is Sunday, our lazy day for tea drinking, leafing through the magazines and catalogs that stack up during the week, and reading from our regularly mounting piles of books that hold various bookmarks haphazardly poking this way and that. Irma’s current stack includes a book of contemporary poetry; a physics and a DNA book for laypeople; Breakfast at Tiffany’s – she loves the character Holly Golightly and rereads the book once every few years; Cancer: 50 Essential Things to Do; How to Fight Cancer and Win; Beating Cancer with Nutrition; The Cure for All Cancers: Including over 100 Case Histories of Persons Cured; and a complete collection of the poems of John Keats. The Keats’ book tops the stack and is marked at his “This Living Hand,” by one of her favorite headshots of me. The poem is speculated to be Keats’ last, and possibly to have been written for Fanny Brawne, the woman with whom he was in love:

This living hand, now warm and capable
    Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
    And in the icy silence of the tomb,
    So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
    That thou wouldst wish thine own heart dry of blood
    So in my veins red life might stream again,
    And thou be conscience-calmed—see here it is—
    I hold it towards you.

    While in the poem the lover ought to wish to trade her life for his, as with everything else, Irma’s interpretation held a slightly different twist.
     To the left of Irma’s book stack is mine, which includes various books on fly-fishing, philosophy, and history. On top of my stack is a new bookmark: Irma’s laminated obituary which ran in the paper last Sunday, and which kindly arrived from the funeral home in yesterday’s mail.
    Images of Irma, me, and Irma and me adorn the white bookcases that lean against the south wall. They are held in various frames Irma decoupaged herself, carefully selecting from magazines, flyers, and advertisements images and words that she felt aptly and humorously described a particular scene. There is one of us, arms around each other’s waists, on the beach in the Outer Banks. She decoupaged the frame with images of seashells, crabs, and other ocean life she had clipped, but she had also added the phrases “catches biggest fish,” “great bass,” “best crabs,” and “eat here.” Like Irma’s mug, the phrases are connected to arrows that point waggishly this way and that.
    When I first met Irma she was working in the library at my university. I’d see her behind the counter, long, straight, dark hair, bangs hanging in front of her big brown eyes. She was impish and shy. She’d always been scuttling around in the stacks, busying herself to intentionally avoid interaction. One day I was returning a stack of books late in the evening; I had been working in my office grading papers until about 10:30 and I carried some books over on my way home. As it was nearing 11:00, closing time, and it was a Friday night, no students were studying and the library was empty. Irma was sitting uncharacteristically relaxed, feet up on a footstool reading Nietzsche’s The Gay Science. She didn’t see me come in and so I had the luxury of observing her, if only for a moment, completely at ease and un-self-conscious. When she saw me, she leapt to her feet, fumbled a bit, gestured toward the empty chairs and tables, and said apologetically that it had been “entirely dead” since about seven. I dismissed her concern with being found out and launched into inquiries about her interest in Nietzsche, what other books of his she had read, and if she could recall any favorite aphorisms. Her demeanor entirely changed. She became outspoken, gesturing wildly and speaking rapidly, only partly aware that I was her audience. From that moment on I was hooked. It soon became apparent that so was she.
    When Irma got cancer we talked about how things would inevitably go. How she would decline, what we would do before that happened, what actions should follow her demise. Now I am sitting in our sunroom, numb, contemplating the next act of our play. To the right of my stack of books are the bottles, about thirty total. In the twenty-three years we were together, we kept a large Tupperware container on the top shelf of the closet, in the back, with the remainder pills for every prescription we had ever filled. The container includes painkillers and antibiotics for toothaches, urinary tract and kidney infections, severe headaches, sprained ankles, and the list goes on. The day Irma died, I added to the container the remainders of the litany of drugs they had tried on her until the very end, when the drugs were then administered simply to keep her out of her misery, and pills done away with in favor of a drip system that meant she didn’t have to wait a moment for some inevitably overburdened nurse to administer the next morphine fix. If only I had that drip system, what I am about to do might be simpler.
    By now the rum is having its fully desired effect. I stand and head to the kitchen to add another three shots to my mug. On an empty stomach, my head is foggy enough for the walk to the kitchen to be an experience in slow motion. I remove the tea bag and the fresh pour mixes with the residue at the bottom of my cup, only slightly watering down the taste of the Gosling. Standing at the kitchen counter, flashes of Irma flood my mind. At first I hear her laughter, see her dancing, smiling, and then there are the images of us making love, fast and furious, slow and intense, and then our wedding day, the birthday when I presented her with a trip to Paris, and then our last moments. I close my eyes, holding the counter fiercely, and try to resurrect her touch on my skin, the feel of her face on the tips of my fingers as I glide them across the surface of her cheek and down to her chin. I’m swaying my head back and forth deep in memory, attempting to summon the sensation of her lips touching mine. It’s been a week and it seems like forever since I last held her. How can I summon those eyes, the intensity and depths of them? How can I bring them back, gaze into them, embrace her?
    I remember how she had looked at me since that first conversation in the library. Her affection for me had never waned, and neither had mine for her. She could send messages through her gaze that were mutually understood, and I can clearly recall how she reminded me of our pact during the last day she was able to talk. Her voice was drowsy and stilted, the energy each word took evident in her concentration. “Adrian,” she said, “You — don’t live — without me — because — you — feel — you — must,” she had said with deep determination, and with the sort of tone a mother might use when telling her child that just because the other kids are jumping off a bridge, he doesn’t have to (though in characteristic Irma fashion her inference was the opposite). “You — meet — me — on the — other — side.” “You – re – memb – er — where — they — are, — right?” “I know, top shelf, to the right of your winter sweaters. I haven’t forgotten,” I had said.
    Staring at the bottles, I take another swig from my mug. It is so quiet that I can hear myself swallow. The sun now warms the room and every glance about reminds me of her absence. Her mug is full, her books unmoved. Her afghan is tossed over the back of her chair, as though at any moment she is going to come in laughing about something, sit down, glance at me with that grin, pick up her mug, and begin chatting to me enthusiastically about what she finds so humorous. How many Sundays did we spend in this room? How many times did she come in just that way? Now it seems like so few, and yet they resonate so powerfully. How many days in a year? How many weeks? How many Sundays? How many years did we have this routine? It has all vanished so quickly, her scent is still fresh on the wool afghan. I reach over and pull it to me, ball it up, and bury my nose in a bunched section. Breathing deeply, I close my eyes and envision her.
    Death will not unite us. I know that. We both knew that. There is no afterlife, and who would want one anyway? Why go on for an eternity as something not fully human? I want the feel of her skin, the touch of her lips, the smell of her. I don’t want some ethereal vapor that I cannot even grasp. I want to be me and I want Irma to be her. I want this life, the life we knew together. An eternity spent not as myself and not with her as herself — that’s a worse hell than living without her. What I want is the absence of pain, absence of grief, absence of absence. To wish for an absence of memory would be to undo all that came before – the beauty, the sadness, the joy, and the treasure of a life spent with Irma. I don’t want another life with someone else. I don’t want another life with her somewhere that is not here. I want to take what I have had, to savor it, rejoice in it, and to end with it in my arms. If I could wish for anything it would be eternal recurrence.
    I begin unscrewing the caps of the bottles and dumping them out one by one. I want them mixed together. I don’t want to know what I am ingesting, exactly. Precision isn’t the point. An onslaught, that’s what we had always hoped would do the trick. Part of me wants to be sober, to dump the contents of my mug down the drain, to face it and her with a full awareness of the act so that in my imagination I am fully there. But if I am going to do this right, do it as we had planned, then I need as many competing drugs in my system as possible. The anti-depressants I’d been prescribed since Irma’s death (and which I haven’t yet taken), the painkillers, the alcohol, and whatever else is in these bottles that I can’t even begin to recall. Years of a life spent together are bottled up in these miscellaneous prescriptions for illnesses entirely forgotten. It’s strange how time is spent. I have no capacity to remember why, exactly, Irma was prescribed amoxicillin, but there it is, clearly printed on a label with her name. I strain to recall an episode in 1998 when she would have been prescribed this drug, but I don’t know. That’s not what I know about Irma. What I know about Irma is how she affected me. What I know about Irma is what she became in the time we were together, how she learned to show everyone else those impish qualities I loved, how she went from being a shy woman behind a desk at the university library to standing totally unaware in that bathing suit in that Five-and-Dime, completely in herself, without any visibly apparent insecurity.
    Irma had her insecurities, but in the time we had been together she had flowered into something unbelievable. She had just let more and more of herself out every day until everyone around us fell in love with the Irma I had been in love with since that first Friday night.
    Irma and I didn’t tire of each other; we didn’t want separation. It wasn’t how we were made, at least not together. We realized early on that we didn’t want children, if only because we knew they would need us and take us away from each other. We didn’t want anything in between us. We had friends, but we socialized with them together. We had jobs, and we of course went to those independently, but every other waking minute was spent together. We thought about children a few times, but each time we were reminded of what it would really mean, forever. We also knew that if one of us should die, we would have to go on for the sake of the child or children, and that was not something either of us wanted to have to do. We knew that we wanted to live together and die together. We didn’t want any forced separations, any body, any life, any thing to get between us.
    We were together less than a year when we realized we would live together and die together, but we didn’t yet know how to make it a reality. It was just something we both understood, and it was one of those understandings that we conveyed just by looking at each other whenever we watched a movie about a spouse or lover dying or whenever we read or heard about the same. All we had to do is glance at each other and we knew: that was never going to happen to us, not quite like that anyway. We knew we couldn’t control how we would die or when, but we knew that, if we didn’t die together in some sort of catastrophe, it wouldn’t be long before we would find each other again, if only through release.
    Then when we’d been together about five years, Irma came across a poem by Richard Cranshaw titled “Epitaph.” I placed a copy of the poem beside the bottles last night before going to bed. Last night I listened to the music we loved, slept for the last time in our bed, and found that poem and copied it on our personal copier so that it would be here this morning for me to read again. I remember when Irma first discovered it. She brought it home and stood in the kitchen, reading it to me, tears filling her eyes and her voice cracking:
    To these, whom Death again did wed,
    This grave’s their second marriage-bed;
    For though the hand of Fate could force
    ‘Twixt soul and body a divorce,
    It could not sunder man and wife
    Because they both lived but one life.
    Peace, good Reader, do not weep,
    Peace, the lovers are asleep.
    They, sweet turtles, folded lie
    In the last knot that Love could tie.
    And though they lie as they were dead,
    Their pillow stone, their sheets of lead,
    Pillow hard, and sheets not warm,
    Love made the bed: they’ll take no harm;
    Let them sleep: let them sleep on,
    Till this stormy night be gone
    And the eternal morrow dawn;
    Then the curtains will be drawn,
    And they wake into a light,
    Whose day shall never die in night.

    That was when we figured out how to do it.
    Of course the poem isn’t literal, we would never be buried together. Irma and I wanted to be cremated; Irma already has been. Her ashes are sitting in an urn to the right of my arm. I brought them home on Friday.
    I had gotten things in order at the funeral home, done what they call “planning.” I paid ahead for my cremation, wrote down what my wishes were. Sam, at the funeral home, had been very kind. He wasn’t sure if I was ready to make such decisions, thought perhaps that I was rushing things, or maybe wanted to wait a few weeks or a month to go over such details since I had so recently handled the details of Irma’s demise. I assured him now was the time. I explained that it offered me some comfort knowing that these details would be taken care of, and that, while we wouldn’t be buried together, he would know what my wishes were: to have my ashes scattered in the same place Irma’s had been. I told him a private ceremony for Irma was planned for a few weeks from now and that I would get the details to him shortly, and if he could please place them on file, he would know what my wishes were for my scattering.
     Yesterday afternoon I drafted the letter to the funeral home explaining where Irma’s ashes were to be scattered, along with my own. I hand wrote the letter so there would be no suspicion of foul play; I included a copy of my driver’s license as verification for the signature. I sent the letter certified. It would arrive on Monday, tomorrow.
    Irma and I had spent many lovely afternoons in a nearby park sunning and reading by the lake. It reminded Irma of the English Lake country, the home of the English Lake poets. We would pack a picnic, share a bottle of wine, read, and learn about botany and insects together. Those afternoons had always been exclusively about us. Hardly anyone made use of that area. The park was large and most people stayed in the areas by the playgrounds, campgrounds, grills, or the large lake where there was fishing, boating, and skiing. It was a bit of a hike to get to this little lake, and there were no activities to be had on it. There were no bathrooms nearby, no playgrounds, no people. It was our quiet place where we escaped the world and retreated into what made us us. We found solace in our togetherness in the peaceful quiet of that place. That was where we would be scattered, together.
    The rum is starting to wear off. It is nearing 11:00 a.m. I get up to get the Gosling bottle, and this time pour a mug full. It is past teatime. I don’t typically drink Gosling, it’s an expensive rum, but I bought it for this special occasion. I want to celebrate.
    I return to the sunroom with the bottle of Gosling and a 2-liter bottle of water. I top off the tea in Irma’s mug with a little Gosling – we clink mugs, or at least I clink our mugs.
    I stare at the dumped pills from the bottles. There are a lot of them. I’m hoping I can take them all. When I was a kid I had trouble taking pills. At first my mom had crushed them up in sugar water, then she had made me practice by swallowing M&M’s. Irma was worried about that, but she had us both practice every day by taking a multitude of daily vitamins. When the healthy practice began it was so we could both live forever, and also because we didn’t yet know which one of us would go first, so we both had to practice swallowing those pills.
    I organize the pills from small to large. I figure I should start with the large ones, just in case I begin having difficulty swallowing. That’s what Irma, in the end, had suggested. Another swig from my mug, and the play begins.
    I walk to the filing cabinet and get out my Will; then I walk to the bookcase and take down Nietzsche’s The Gay Science; then I go to the stereo and cue up one of our favorite CDs: Queen’s Greatest Hits I & II. Some of the songs are long, and I am hoping that by the time the music stops, I will have too. I carry my Will, Nietzsche, and the remote back to the couch. I place the Will on the table. Opening the book, I take a straight swig of the Gosling and read aloud On the Last Hour, aphorism 315: “Storms are my danger. Will I have my storm of which I will perish, as Oliver Cromwell perished of his storm? Or will I go out like a light that no wind blows out but that becomes tired and sated with itself – a burned-out light? Or finally: will I blow myself out lest I burn out?”
    I sit back on the couch, place Irma’s afghan over me, and hit play on the remote. I listen to track nine on disk two first, “Who Wants to Live Forever?” Then I begin to rhythmically swallow pills in beats to the music, “...who wants to live forever, when love must die...,” alternating between the Gosling and the water.
    I am thinking about the Keats’ poem and extending my hand toward Irma. I am imagining her joking with me about wanting more than my hand, as she would, if she were here (and she is), certainly play on the synecdochical image of only my hand reuniting with her.
    As I swallow, drink, and sway to the music, I become more and more sleepy, woozy, foggy-headed.
    I take a last look at the prescription bottles, and as I close my eyes, I imagine Irma sitting beside me, head cocked to the side, saying with an impish grin on her face and that knowing look in her eyes:
    “There are some things that can’t be prescribed.”

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