Earth, Sky, Trees

The doctor's office turned absurd, disconnected from Black Mountain Cancer Center. When the floor began to gyrate, Joe wanted to run across the tilting room, ram his head through the large glass window and scream, "Who put those damn mountains there? Why is that stupid moon out in the middle of the day?" He wanted to shake the doctor until he agreed what he'd said was preposterous, an offense to the Almighty that cannot stand.

"As quickly as this has spread—is spreading," the doctor's flat voice continued. "Frankly, with it already past your lymph nodes—"

"Plain language," Libby said, his wife speaking plainly herself.

"It's in your liver and pancreas. Stage IV. Mortality rate is high."

"How high?" Libby said.

Joe gripped the sides of the chair that threatened to tip over, though a part of him wanted to fall, to kick on the floor like an out of control two-year old. He struggled to regain his balance, to shut everything out. Still, there was that doctor's dull voice telling him his life was never going to be the same.

"Ten percent chance of survival," the doctor said. Then, looking away, "Maybe."

More aggressive the treatment, better the chances, the doctor droned on. Critical to start treatment immediately. Expensive, yes, but there were ways to reduce costs.

Joe wanted to demand that he and Libby trade places—that he give her his organs. He wanted to let go of the chair, grab that doctor by his clean white coat and shout in his face until the room stopped spinning, until things were right again, until the foolish man said Libby was not sick, was not going to die. Instead, Joe sat there. Stunned. Silent.

"Let's go," Libby said. "Not wasting my last breaths in a hospital." Like a mother holding a bewildered child's hand, Libby led Joe down the fun-house stairs and into the twisted sunlight.

________

Over the next six months, Joe tended to his wife's daily needs, bathed her, washed her soiled clothes, and arranged friends or relatives to sit with her while he cut wood. Her brown hair had turned grey and the severe weight loss had left her frail. After months of decline and unrelenting pain, Libby stopped talking about cosmic identity, her love of stars, or visiting New Mexico.

"I want you to do it," Lib finally said.

He'd heard her wrong, Joe thought. No way she'd asked him to kill her. He shook out his Citizen-Times and went back to reading.

"I'd do it for you," she said.

Joe folded his paper. Leah, the Hospice nurse in the kitchen washing dishes, hummed a church hymn. He couldn't remember the name of the song, but his mother had always called it "Jesus is Calling." He poked in the fire and orange embers scattered like runaway planets from a faraway galaxy. Then the embers were gone, the galaxy wiped out in seconds.

"You going to pretend you didn't hear me?"

Leah, shaking water from her hands, poked her head into the room long enough to say that if they didn't need anything else she was leaving. Before Joe had a chance to thank her and see her out she was gone.

Joe leaned the poker against the fireplace. "Was hoping I'd heard you wrong. Don't ask me to murder you."

The walls seemed closer, the ceiling lower than only seconds before. Joe wanted to leave, to escape hearing whatever was coming next.

"I am asking. The man I love should stop this pain—the man who loves me."

Joe sat on the floor beside his wife's bed. It was mercy, she told him, not murder. Think of it as opening a prison cell, setting the prisoner free.

"You're asking me to commit the worst kind of wrong."

But was she? If things were reversed, would he not want her to end his suffering? He loved her beyond any measure, so how was it wrong to end her pain? She...