Page 37 of Ask Your Mom If I'm Real

“Have I ever told you how much I have enjoyed my life?” she asked.

She had.

So many times.

Especially after she’d gotten sick, and we’d gotten the heart-wrenching diagnosis.

“You have,” I agreed.

“I just wanted you to know that you’re the best thing that ever happened to me,” she whispered. “If you hadn’t walked into that bar and saved me, I would’ve died there. He would’ve killed me.”

I hated her father.

He’d tried and failed to insinuate himself into our lives ever since she’d left, and every time he tried, I wanted to go back to that shitty bar and kill him.

If it wasn’t for her brother, I might have.

“I know, baby,” I said.

“I wish we’d gotten more time,” she admitted. “I wished we had until I was eighty.”

I wished that, too.

She was fifty-five.

She should’ve had so many good years left in her.

But she didn’t.

And now I was left wondering how the hell I was going to face the rest of my life alone…

“I wish we had that too, darlin’,” I murmured. “But we have right now.”

She smiled dreamily, then opened her eyes, those baby blues directed at me.

“One last ride?” my wife rasped.

Her lips were so chapped that they were cracking and bleeding.

I didn’t offer her water.

I’d learned that when you were dying, dehydrating was a good thing.

The hospice nurse that had come to the house had been with our daughter, Lisa, last week, when I’d brought up the issue that she wasn’t drinking anything.

Lisa, our smarty pants nurse of a daughter, had explained. “People often need less pain medication, urinate less, have less vomiting, and breathe more easily with decreased congestion with dehydration.”

I’d remembered looking down at my feet and thinking what a shitty death that had to be.

But I’d noticed that Lisa was right.

That didn’t make the terror of knowing she had barely any water in her any less.

Today, though, I knew that it would be her last day.

I wouldn’t have to worry about her eating, drinking, or having enough pain medication.

I wouldn’t have to worry about her being in so much pain that she cried dry tears.

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