It’s hard to watch somebody suffering.  People don’t know what to do.  What do you say to an emaciated ninety year-old woman, lying on her back, hands curled on her chest in a pose of death, face impassive, eyes staring, composing a prayer: “please help me die”?   You bend over and kiss her dry, cool cheek.   She cannot speak.  What do you say after that?

“You’re looking well….”

“How are you?”

“I see you’re not feeling well and that you can’t speak, is there any way you can tell me what you want?   Shall I go?  Shall I keep talking?”

“I have my ukulele here, would you like a little music?”  And if she doesn’t, how is she going to let you know?

Her daughter is at a loss.  Maybe not the easiest relationship, going back to when the woman was a child and this now cadaverous looking old lady in the bed was up and around and raising her.  This disabling disease has surely not made things easier betwen them.  She complains about her mother’s depression, that she just will not look on the bright side.

If the old woman could talk she’d say “there is no bright side for me, bedridden, unable to even communicate, in constant pain from a disease that, with maniacal slowness, continues to get worse and worse, more disabling and more painful.  In a merciful world I’d be allowed to die.  I have a fucking DNR on the door, why can’t I just have a goddamned stroke already like everyone else?”

But the old woman cannot talk, though she’s expressed her wish to die to her daughter whenever she’s been able to.  I play the ukulele, her daughter and Sekhnet, both wearing surgical masks against the daughter’s bronchitis, sing.   At a certain point she manages to raise one finger which her daughter translates “one more?”  The old woman gives a kind of nod.

We play Goodnight, by the Beatles, the one sung so fetchingly by Ringo at the end of the White Album.  We do not perform it anywhere near as fetchingly as Ringo and the boys did, but, under the circumstance, even if Ringo and the boys were there, John and George alive again and at the peak of their powers, with a string section, it wouldn’t have mattered that much.

I think of how much worse many people have it than I do at the moment.  It is only a dream of mine that is on a respirator, after all, not me myself or any loved one.  I try to cheer up, much like the old woman being urged to make the best of her disabling Parkinson’s Disease.