Cathy Mauk or painless death. However, the drug Nembutal, a heavy duty barbiturate— also known as Pentobarbital and colloquially as ‘Death in a Bottle’—is described as ideal for a swift, painless, sweet sleep. Unfortunately, it is a highly controlled substance. Across the US border into Mexico it is more freely available—in pet shops and veterinarian offices. I’m encouraged to know it is also used for physician-assisted suicide in several US states, Switzerland, and the Netherlands. During those days caring for my mother that funereal March, I held a fantasy about scooping her up and flying her to Australia, where I would take her to a special place I know on the southeast coast, a big weatherboard house with a wide veranda on top of a headland. There, I would set her up to breathe in the smell of the sea, to make out what she could of the green ti-trees and she-oaks and the endless expanse of sapphire water. Rainbow lorikeets would land on the wood railing looking for crusts of bread, perhaps one would light on her chair. Scratchy-voiced wattle birds would call from the gum trees. I would wrap her in a soft wool blanket to keep off the chill of the afternoon breeze while letting it gently lift her thinning hair. We would sit in silence sensing the world, the two of us holding hands, sipping martinis (my mother still loved her martinis). The afternoon shadows would lengthen. I would pour a vial of Nembutal into a second martini and place it in her hand. I would wish her sweet dreams as she closed her eyes on a drift of sea, an enveloping sky, a rainbow of feathers, and the love of a daughter. “…unstring my bones,” I would recite the words of poet Mary Oliver like a prayer, “let me be not one thing but all things, and wondrously scattered, shake me free from my name.” While I genuinely wanted to relieve my mother of her suffering and allow her a peaceful end to her life, I also realised she is not me. And, although she has said she does not want to go on, that she prays for a heart attack and wonders what would happen if she stopped taking all her medication or turned off her oxygen, she would not be a party to taking her own life. “I wouldn’t want to miss something,” she has joked on her good days. In my fantasy I was both daughter and mother. In life and in death my mother goes before me. I learn from her strengths, her failures, her fears, her courage. Her suffering evokes my own fears. I wanted to do for her what I want someone to do for me. As my mother approached the age of 97 she fell at home and fractured her pubic rami. It wasn’t a serious break and, after a few days in hospital, she was transferred once again to the rehabilitation centre. But this time, as much as she had hoped she would die in her own home, she decided
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Crab Orchard Review