Chapter 37
DEB
IT’S SUNDAY, AND THE HOUSE is quiet. Billy is tending his fiddle-leaf fig when I ask him to join me at the computer. He pulls up a chair and squints at the screen, his hand on my back.
I take a deep breath and show him a place called Greenwood Hills. Plush, amenity-filled apartments where there’s no maintenance besides basic cleaning, and medical staff is always on deck. It’s spacious enough for grandchildren to stay over, yet insular enough for this life season.
Our house is worth a lot. If we sell it, we can afford this.
I show him the numbers and location, only a half hour from where we are now. We aren’t yet sixty, I say to him. Young enough for something new. I grind my teeth, waiting for him to resist.
But he squeezes my hand and says, “I’ve been thinking about this too.”
“You have?”
“Yep. And wondering what the kids might say.”
I roll my eyes. “Lots, but what else is new?”
He chuckles, his attention on the computer screen. “Do they have full kitchens for your commissions?”
“They do.” I click through a few photos.
“Garages?”
“One car.” I smile. “Plenty to protect your bike from the elements.”
I point to the screen. “There’s also a common room like in The Thursday Murder Club.
” I figure Richard Osman can only help us here.
I pat Billy’s thigh beside mine and say, “Just something to think about.” When I reach to close the website, he stops me.
Scrolls for a few more minutes. Then he leans back.
He looks at the quiet house around us, and then at me. “Would you be there?”
I lift a hand to my heart, appalled that he thinks I might send him there alone. “Of course I would.”
He exhales and says, “Then it sounds like home.”
Two days later, we take a tour of Greenwood Hills. It is sprawling and green. Not very hilly, but there are slopes and this is North Texas, so we let it pass. They couldn’t very well call it Greenwood Slopes.
It is honestly beautiful. There are live oaks and ferns. A koi pond with a footbridge and a weeping willow. Bright flowers everywhere. Someone from a landscaping crew waves as we pass.
After the admissions director shows us around, he tells us to explore at our leisure and then come see him in his office when we’re ready to talk. So we meander the grounds of what might become our first move in decades—and Billy’s last.
We would have an apartment with nine hundred square feet, a third of our Dallas home.
I think of the weeks we spent setting up that home.
The checklists and paint stirrers and Home Depot runs, the anticipation of traditions and togetherness, of the years we’d spend growing old there.
I didn’t think then of how it might end.
We visit the common room, where a big calendar hangs on the back wall boasting visitor performances, mahjong, book clubs, drug trials, and a caretaker support group. “Oh, look,” Billy says. “They have mini golf.”
I nod, noting a baking exchange and wondering if my friends would drive all the way out here to visit me.
We stand back and observe for a few minutes.
It’s clean here, and there’s a bounty of direct-care employees, all of whom are patient as they interact with residents.
About six of those residents are sitting in massage chairs in front of a big-screen TV, watching Fox Nation with closed captions.
They all have medical pendants around their necks, our potential neighbors.
Two of them are dozing. We asked the director about other married couples, and he said there are several, one with early-onset.
Only one. Although—he looked in my direction—many younger regulars from the broader community attend the caretaker support group, some of them multiple times a week.
I didn’t realize how much this would feel like a medical facility. Smell like a medical facility. I look around the common room and try to appreciate feeling young, but mostly I feel like I don’t belong.
The residents are talking to the television about Medicare requirements and drug names.
Bills and gas prices. One man heckles the newscaster with, “Tell that to Jimmy Carter!” To which a woman commands, “Oh, step off it, Larry.” Another woman requests a whatchamacallit, and the staff immediately understands that she wants a Werther’s.
She unwraps it with a loud crinkle, while yet another woman asks how to adjust her chair from rolling to kneading. There are very few men here.
On television, the president appears behind a lectern, behind his DC lens.
Where he stands, it probably smells of leather and cologne.
Where we stand, Lysol and applesauce and Lubriderm.
Then the woman with the Werther’s candy points an arthritic finger straight at the president of the United States and says, “That man’s teeth are beautiful.
Me, I like sweets too much.” She grins wide, revealing chips and stains.
I swallow a chuckle. Beside me, Billy steps forward as though he wants to pull veneers from his pocket.
But then the Jimmy Carter man says to the Werther’s woman that he has half a mind to come out of retirement just to fix her teeth.
A little light comes over Billy. He steps closer and asks, “You a dentist?”
The man half turns, half nods. “Used to be.”
The words strike me as tragic, but Billy seems content to know that he would have a friend here. He would have more than that, actually. There’s a lot for him here.
But what’s here for me? My house doesn’t feel like home anymore, yet neither does this.
I find people terribly easy to love, so I’m sure I could make friends.
I’m already itching to know more about the woman who pointed at the president’s teeth.
But as I watch the woman still trying to adjust her massage chair, I wonder how necessary relatability is for friendship.
Because there’s a wide gap between them and me.
Of course, I tell myself, it’s not like we would be living in the common room.
We would have our little apartment, Billy and I.
When we turn to leave the common room, he pauses at the big calendar.
“Oh, look,” he says. “They have mini golf.”
Outside, Billy asks what I think.
I think it checks all the boxes and then some. I don’t voice my concerns about who I would be here. Identity is so entangled with place. But I have just as many concerns about who I would be while isolated at our house with Billy becoming increasingly confused and dependent.
A chickadee sings as an orderly asks a woman if she wants some company on the way back to her room. The resident nods, and they walk together, chatting. Many of the orderlies, I notice, are around my age.
It would be worse, I decide, not to have this.
The willow rustles its hair over the pond as I answer Billy. “I like it. You?”
“Me too,” he says. “But we don’t need to make a decision today.”
On the way back to the director’s office, we pass a sparkling pool where a man is hitting a beach ball with some children. I imagine Sadie on Billy’s shoulders in that water, and I feel a sense of peace.
We talk to the director and ask more questions. We make no commitments, but we take the paperwork home, where a roast is simmering in the slow cooker.
April greets us with a frown. “That was a long appointment.”
I press the paperwork against my chest because we told her we were going to the doctor. Billy circumvents the interrogation by asking me, “Can I show you something?”
“Sure.”
So April returns to dicing potatoes, and I follow Billy.
He leads me into our bathroom, where he closes the door and says, “I love you.”
Well, this is ominous. His countenance has completely changed since the tour. Maybe he liked it less than he let on, or he has reservations he didn’t want to get into there. I set the paperwork on the counter, waiting for him to say more.
“There are certain decisions we need to make while I can still be part of them. Otherwise, you won’t be able to live with yourself.”
I frown. “What decisions?”
He opens the medicine cabinet and retrieves a large pill bottle. I oversee his Donepezil every day so he doesn’t forget to take it, or forget that he has already taken it. But that’s in the kitchen. This is not Donepezil.
He twists the lid off the bottle to reveal an array of pills, different colors and sizes. There are a lot of them, with a slip of folded paper. His voice drops. “They’re from a credible doctor.”
Fear spreads through me. “For what?”
He sighs like he doesn’t want me to make him say it, but I most certainly will.
“For you to give me if the time comes to end things.” He pulls out the paper and unfolds it: instructions that involve crushing pills and adding the powder to sugar water.
I slap his hand, knocking the paper to the bathroom floor. Dizzy, I drop onto the closed toilet, head in my hands. “How could you think I would want this?”
He picks up the paper, slips it back into the bottle, and screws the lid on. “I know you don’t want it right now. But think about what’s coming for us. I don’t want your life to end just because mine is.”
I stand up and snatch the pill bottle from his hand. “Tell me whether this is for you or for me.”
He pinches the bridge of his nose, and I shake the bottle at him in emphasis, the sound like a baby’s rattle. “Do you want this option, or do you want me to have this option? Tell me.”
“Debra.”
I can count on one hand the number of times he has called me by my full name.
He continues, “You’re considering moving to assisted living and becoming my caretaker. You’re not even sixty.”
“I know how old I am. Answer my question.”
But I already know his answer: he is doing this for me.
“My answer is that I love you.”
With that confirmation, I open the bottle. The toilet. The very same toilet that saw my morning sickness, my young husband holding back my hair.
He throws forth his hand to stop me. “And I know you love me. So I’m here in my right mind telling you that if it comes to it—this would not diminish your love. The disease could progress for years and years. I don’t want to become a burden.”
My hand is shaking. What if I want this burden? What if keeping him in any condition is less of a burden than actively ending him? How could I get up one day and make the decision to administer his death? If it were to end his suffering, I would do it. But if I’m to suffer, then let me.
His hand is reaching toward me as though I’m on the edge of a cliff. “Those pills are hard to get,” he says. “Let’s at least keep them tucked away? A lot of people change their minds.”
“A lot of people do this for someone who’s in unbearable pain! That’s different!”
He does not argue. Just watches to see what I’ll do with the pills.