22. Mother

“If I ever get that old,” my mother says, pausing to click the near-dead lighter, “roll me and my wheelchair out to the middle of a field and shoot me."

A request to assist in your parent’s suicide needs to either be met with deadly seriousness or written off as a joke. I choose somewhere in between, and Mom laughs at me.

I mutter, “I’m not gonna do that,” while I dodge her elbow. She’s shaking the lighter and somehow it works, because next time she flicks it a small flame appears. She touches it to the cigarette waiting in her mouth, and I turn the coffee mug in my hands, watching the liquid inside swirl. I take a sip, Mom takes a drag and we both seek solace in our respective drugs before we carry on with this screwed-up conversation.

“If you don’t, I’ll do it myself.” We both glance at the old woman across the street that had initially sparked my mother’s first statement. Her walker scraped across the driveway as she leaned heavily upon it, trying to make her way to the car where her grandson was leaning. The tapping sound his fingers made on the hood was audible even from the porch where Mom and I sat. “What an ass.”

“It wouldn’t kill him to help her out,” I agree, “Or at least have some fucking patience.”

“Language.”

“Sorry.” The old woman finally makes it to the passenger side, where the boy takes her walker away and shoves it into the back seat. He treats her like glass, however, and gently guides her into the car. The action almost redeems him, but then he slams the door shut, gets into his own side and drives away- entirely too fast for a residential street, I might add.

“I’m serious. I don’t want to get that old. I don’t want everyone treating me like I’m an inconvenience.”

“You wouldn’t be,” I say, but I might be lying. My remaining grandparents care for each other, so I’ve never had to. Mom, on the other hand, lived with her grandmother for some time and watched the stress it put on her own mother’s health. Great Grandma Dot went insane after awhile- they think she had Alzheimer’s, but the term didn’t exist back then- and would catch dishrags on fire and toss them down the laundry chute, as well as a slew of other, less mentionable things. Eventually my grandmother became ill and her sisters removed their mother from her care. They put her in a nursing home where she believed that the Mafia was holding her hostage. In or out it was an inconvenience. “And I’d be able to deal with it if you were.”

“What if I wasn’t myself anymore? What if I turned into like a vegetable, I was so old?”

“I guess. I dunno.” I couldn’t know until it happened. “But I guess if I were like that I’d want someone to off me.”

“Then you know what I mean.”

My coffee’s gone and her cigarette’s out. We get up and leave the porch for the inside of the house, with the silent promise to play Kevorkian for each other hanging between us.