A week ago the spousette was still, albeit barely, up and about. She informed me at noon that she was due in Berkeley for a hairdresser’s appointment. I delivered her to the city’s tony but congested Elmwood District and dropped her off as close as I could park, about fifty steps away, and she tottered into the establishment on her own. Since these things typically consume a couple of hours, I set off to run some errands, but half an hour later, when all I had done was retrieve my shirts from the laundry, she called to say that there had been a “computer mix-up,” and that they had no record of her appointment and her regular stylist wasn’t even in that day. I had my own guesses as to the likely origin of the “mix-up,” but deemed it impolitic to share these. I retrieved her, and then we went to CæsarCare for her regularly scheduled blood draw.

That evening a friend came over for pizza, and also to look at the marvelous streaming series “Slow Horses,” which we had promised to show him, so I set up the ol’ short-throw projector in the front room and we reprised season 1, episode 1 for him. Afterward, we bedded down for the night. She has never left her sickroom again. Sometime between Sunday night and Monday morning, some last oncological firewall was breached, and upon waking she could no longer walk or even stand. Perhaps unsurprisingly, when the hospital emailed the blood results, her CA-125 “cancer antigen” numbers (we never like to see these rise to higher than 35, not that they’ve been anything nearly that low since shortly after chemo in early 2023; they’ve been heading north all year) proved to have engaged the afterburners and soared past 4000, almost half again over her “previous worst.” At this point, she decided to exercise her rights under California’s End of Life Option* law, a course she’d long contemplated. She’d been under the impression that she had merely to ask, and that permission would be speedily granted. The hospice nurse the following morning was taken aback. No indeed, she informed Lina, you need to start in motion a complicated process that usually takes about three weeks. “I can’t take this for three more weeks,” Lina moaned. Me neither, I silently seconded

It turns out that the nurse was referring to CæsarCare protocols (why does this not surprise me?). In the afternoon, hospice sent us a social worker to whom we explained our plight, and this worthy got right on it, putting us in touch with a physician who specializes in end-of-life procedures—remember when Doc Kevorkian used to do hard time for this sort of thing?—and who has greased the skids for us, walking us through the forms and procedures, enlisting a “second opinion” (both physicians need to be able to attest that the patient is competent and uncoerced) and writing the prescription for the lethal cocktail at the only pharmacy in the region, the amusingly-named “FeelGood Compounders” thirty miles away, that works this vertical-market.** The pharmacy said they could “overnight” it—the main event is on Sunday—but added that in their experience FedEx can’t be relied upon for timely weekend deliveries, so I drove to Pacifica yesterday to retrieve it, having first enlisted Lina’s nephew to sit with her in my absence.

I must say, it felt surreal to engage in an undertaking that, well within living memory, could have got me charged as accessory to murder. Tomorrow afternoon at 3:00, with the supervising physician in attendance, Lina will quickly quaff four ounces of a bitter-tasting mixture of morphine, Valium, phenobarbital, digitalis and amitriptyline, with a chaser of raspberry sorbet so that the aftertaste does not pursue her into the afterlife. This will, within three to five minutes, induce a slumber, then coma, then, typically after one to three hours, the cessation of vital signs. It is naturally easier to convey a dispassionate tone in a written account than it is to contemplate the next thirty hours here on the ground. I am by no means certain that I can present the granite stoicism that my generational cohort was raised to maintain on like occasions

All this will take place outdoors in our overgrown “garden”—location scouts on behalf of a contemplated a remake of Tobacco Road would pounce upon it—in fresh air under clear skies. “I want to go out like my dog did” (pretty much the same deal at around this time last year), she has said. Three kind friends (all former inamorata going back thirty-five to fifty+ years as I didn’t reflect until after I accepted their kind offer) will be assisting me later today in making the venue more presentable for Act V.

It is a mercy. She is helpless, all-but paralyzed, incontinent and visibly declining every day. Indeed, it is difficult to see how she’d make it even another week even sans intervention, so steep and rapid has been the trajectory during this final crisis. It’s painful to watch her personality being, as it were, planed off, the woman I’ve known since her days in the sixties and seventies as a vibrant party girl shedding the externals and being reduced to a nearly mute primate in pain. I’ve been giving her oral doses of morphine. “Don’t stint on that,” the doctor told me. “Don’t worry that she’ll become addicted. “Yeah, Doc,” I replied. “It isn’t as though she’s going to be out and around stealing portable television sets to support her habit, is it?” But the pain relief, of course, exacts a certain cost lucidity-wise.

The cocktail (at the moment still a powder) wasn’t cheap—$700—and while apparently CæsarCare would have done the job in its own time for a modest deductible, the doctor’s fee is considerably higher and his service, critically (Lina: “Pay him anything!”), timely. All told, by the time I retrieve her ashes, the rainy day fund here will have been depleted by many, many barrels, but I don’t fault the doctor (who has, incidentally, rearranged his schedule at, I gather, some inconvenience to himself in order to advance L’s exit by about twenty hours): the workman is worthy of his hire. And fortunately our household finances are such—’twas not ever so—that the expenses can be covered without having recourse to the usurers.

cordially,

*The law was enacted in 2016 after lobbying by, among others, the family of twenty-nine year-old Brittany Maynard, who just about this time ten years ago was obliged to travel to Oregon to undertake what was then illegal in California. We didn’t realize it at the time—the case was well-publicized—but Brittany’s aunt is a woman we’ve both known since high school, and with whom we’ve remained in intermittent contact.

**“Vertical” market in one sense; then “horizontal.”