No Toe in the Water

by Patricia Ann Bowen

Mom, my sister Rachel, and I boarded the Zurich Flughafen train to Forch in northern Switzerland, accompanying our mother to end her own life by her own hand in her own pragmatic way. Here we were, on foreign land, on a mission to an even more foreign one, minus our brother who “couldn’t get away” from his law firm, much as we’d all expected, as he’d never had a good relationship with our headstrong mother, even as a likewise headstrong child.

Though nearly ninety, our mother wasn’t as frail as people decades younger, and she’d remained more frugal than most. Raised in New England by German immigrant parents, she told us our family members had certain values stamped on their birth certificates, and low-cost public transportation fit right in with those sensibilities. Besides, she loved trains. We all did. She used to take us as children on Amtrak from Boston to Montreal where we toured the zoo and the flower shows, and on the way she’d have us follow along on an unwieldy paper map spread across the table between our bench seats, pointing out each town and site of interest.

The economical train ride we were on now was the last leg of her last trip.

We helped her manage the short walk from the train station to the three-room apartment arranged by Dignified Dying, the association that assisted folks like us with all the details for such procedures. We gained access to the accommodation with a door code, programmed to the year Mom was born, 1936, so we wouldn’t forget it. The place was one cut above spartan, at least by American standards, but comfortable. A small open living room/kitchenette combination, a guest room with twin beds, and a room where my mother would self-administer her cocktail of lethal drugs. Hers held a queen bed covered with overstuffed down pillows and an equally overstuffed off-white duvet surrounded by four high-backed wooden chairs with green seat cushions. A sideboard held candles, drinking glasses, notepads, and pens.

A medical assistant came by minutes after we arrived, along with a volunteer who turned out to be a student working toward her degree in Social Psychology. They were pleasant and patient as they helped us unpack and settle in while we endured a final round of verbal legalisms and paperwork. In their presence, we met on Zoom with the prescribing physician, one of the same ones Mom had Zoomed with from her home back in the States. It was late morning by the time our guardians left, and we had forty-four more hours to spend with our mother because she had forty-four more hours remaining in her life.

–  –  –

Mom had invited Rachel and me to her home for brunch on a fragrant early spring morning six months ago. After the hazelnut coffee, avocado toast, and carrot muffins were consumed, but for one more cup of coffee out on the deck of her condo, while robins and wrens conversed in the nearby trees, she asked us to help her die with dignity. She said each year her world was getting smaller, she’d outlived all of her siblings and cousins… everyone who’d known her “when”, each year her body allowed her less and less choice of what she was able to do, and every year she added at least one new medical specialist to the roster of physicians approved by her insurance provider.

“This year’s is a neurologist,” she said, “and her diagnostic gift for me is Parkinson’s. So I want to put a stop to this, get it over with. You both know I’m not like those dainty ninnies who step into the swimming pool one toe at a time, making their whole body tremble again and again with each caress of deeper water. I’d rather jump in all at once, immerse myself in the reality. I prefer to ‘just do it.’”

Mom told us she’d been researching assisted dying for the past few years. We knew that her dearest friend, Sydelle, had wanted that way out and enlisted a nurse friend to help her when the time came. When it did come, the nurse friend reneged, and Sydelle sunk into sadness, sedentariness, and senility, claiming to all who would hear her that she was just waiting… waiting to die. “That won’t be me,” Mom said. “I won’t let it. I want to go to Switzerland, be one of those suicide tourists, and I want the two of you to help me.”

“That isn’t funny,” I said. “How can you joke about dying?”

“She’s not joking, Rose,” Rachel said. “She’s being Mom. I can’t say that I agree with what she’s asking us to do. I have to think it through. But I don’t want to see the dark future she’s projecting for herself any more than she does.”

“No, it’s too much to ask, Mom. I can’t help you kill yourself.” Tears were flooding my eyes.

“But you can watch me go further downhill every time you see me?” She locked her hands onto the arms of her chair, leaned forward, glared at me, and raised her voice like she was talking to a recalcitrant child. “Is that about you or about me? Do I have to live a life of increasing misery because you want me to?” She wagged a finger at me and laughed. “Bad girl.”

“You know she’s right,” Rachel said. “If you won’t help her, I will. But I think you should. And Robert, too. This is more than Mom’s issue; we should all own it.”

“That’s sweet of you, dear. I knew if anyone would see things my way it would be you.”

Oh, her little digs. I loved my mother dearly, but she had a way of trashing my feelings with her offhand remarks. My sister played her much better than I did, maybe because she had a few more years’ experience as her daughter.

“I mean it, Mom,” Rachel said. “I’ll help. I’ll track down Geraldine Frisch. You remember her, my old marketing professor at AU in Geneva. We’ve stayed in touch off and on over the years and I know she helped her sister, who had ALS, process the Swiss legal and medical approvals.”

“Thank you. I’d like that. And speaking of Robert, I invited him here, but I’m glad he couldn’t make it,” Mom said. “He’d start talking like a lawyer, trying to convince me, in his own so eloquent way, that the doctors in this great state in this great country know better than I about my inalienable human rights.”

I laughed through my tears, despite the grim topic. I couldn’t help it. She’d imitated her son’s voice and gestures to a T. She knew him so well. How sad for her, for all of us, that they weren’t closer, weren’t there for each other. I’d have to call him. It was only fair that he knew what our mother’s plan was. Despite her disdain for his logic, I felt he could help me come to terms with her decision … or not.

–  –  –

It was 7:05 am. Time.

Rachel and I lay on either side of our mother, she under the duvet and we on top.

Two staff members from Dignified Dying were present to witness Mom’s death. They set up a long thin metal tripod with a digital recorder to document the procedure for legal liabilities.

I asked Mom, “Is it okay if I get under the covers with you? I want to feel the warmth of your body, end to end, one last time.”

“I thought you’d never ask,” she replied, with an ear-to-ear smile that crinkled her eyes.

“Me, too,” Rachel said, and we both removed our shoes, stood up, lifted our side of the comforter, and slid underneath. I mused for a moment then got up, took off every stitch of my clothes, and repositioned myself underneath the covers again, under Mom’s left arm, my tummy to her left side, leg to leg. I didn’t care if the camera was rolling. I wanted to be as close to my mother as I could be. I wasn’t surprised when Rachel followed my lead on the other side.

I cried.  I perspired. I wanted to stop the clock. I wanted this not to be happening. I wanted my mother to change her mind.

One of the assistants handed Mom a liquid emetic to drink so she wouldn’t barf the final drug. While it took effect, Rachel, Mom, and I spent the next thirty minutes whispering about our newest family members, her first great-grandchildren, and about the world she hoped they’d grow up in. I’d thought about recording her final words on my phone, but we all decided to eschew technology at that moment. There was enough of it in the room already.

Then the other assistant had a second glass in hand with 15 grams of powdered pentobarbital dissolved in water. “Would you like a straw, Emily?” she asked in a warm German-accented voice.

“No, thank you.”

“Are you ready?” the assistant asked.

Mom kissed Rachel on the cheek and said, “I love you”, and then me. “And be sure to give Robert my note,” she added. Finally, she looked up and told the woman, “I am now.”

“Will you drink this voluntarily?”

“I will.”

“Here you are, then.”

She drank it all. Took our hands and squeezed them. In a minute her eyes fluttered. In ten more it was over, the camera dismantled. In fifteen more my sister and I left our mother’s side, dressed, and sat with her until her body was taken away.

–  –  –

Rachel and I closed up the apartment and erased the door code per the instructions in the Dignified Dying Guidelines for Family and Friends. We were allowed to stay there a few more days, but the place was like an emotional morgue. We moved to the Hotel Alexander Zurich to await the final package of paperwork along with Mom’s cremains. After we settled in, Rachel called our brother, waking him on purpose at some ungodly hour, and told him it was over. He informed her he’d spoken with Mom before she left for the airport, but we didn’t know whether to believe him or not. It didn’t matter. It didn’t change anything.

The Alexander is in Old Town Zurich, in the German-speaking section of Switzerland, on the banks of the Limmat River, and a five-minute walk from the train station that would take us back to the airport. Our mother wanted her ashes scattered to the winds so, as she put it, “what’s left of me will find many new homes in the universe.” The broad Limmat was perfect for such a mission, so after a late dinner on our final night in the city, Rachel and I packed ourselves a thermos of strong Cabernet and strolled the bridge across from our hotel. Every few steps we’d pause, sip, and discreetly pour a small cup of Mom’s ashes into the rushing water while reciting a memory of her.

“She went out the way she wanted. No fuss. No frills.” I said, poured a cupful of Mom into the river, and sipped.

“She and Dad had such high hopes for Robert, and he fulfilled every one of them. Too bad it didn’t bring lasting happiness for any of them.” Rachel poured a cup.

“She was a better dancer than all of us combined, including Robert. I loved watching her and Dad on the dance floor at our weddings. Their moves. The looks in their eyes. I still miss him. And now I’m missing both of them.” I poured a cup.

“She was the best cook. Potato pancakes. Carrot cake. Lamb couscous.” Rachel poured a cup.

… and so on and so on.

We ran out of ashes before we ran out of memories. But we had one more thing to do while we drank the dregs of our thermos. We sat down on a bench at the end of the bridge and took out a slip of vellum from the unsealed envelope with “ROBERT” printed on its front. She’d left a message for each of us, unsealed, I guess so we could read all the others, so we had. His read:

My dear, dear son,

You will find the things I want you to know, if you care to know them, in the journals I’ve kept off and on for the past sixty years. They are on a shelf under my desk. You can’t miss them.

I have always loved you in my own way, and I know you loved me in yours.

Mother

Back at the hotel, we got a special delivery envelope from the concierge, put the now-sealed vellum inside it, and addressed it to our brother.

BIO

Patricia Ann Bowen is the author of a medical time travel trilogy, a short story collection about people in challenging circumstances, and a serialized beach read. Her short stories have appeared in several anthologies and most recently in Mystery Tribune, Chamber Magazine, Idle Ink, Unlikely Stories, and Commuterlit.com.

She’s taught short story writing, and she leads a critique group of short story writers for the Atlanta Writer’s Club. She divides her time between the burbs in Georgia and at the beach in South Carolina, has four sons, grandkids all over the world, and two cats in the yard. You can connect with her at www.patriciabowen.com