THIRTY-FIVE

Four days before my mother died, I gave her morphine for the first time. I didn’t know if she needed it or not, because by that time she couldn’t communicate at all. She was moaning and moving her arms in a strange twisty way. She looked as if she was in pain, but I couldn’t be sure. I called the nurse.

She said: “Honey, don’t ever hesitate to give her morphine!”

“But what if I give her too much?”

“Think about it: What’s the worst thing that could happen?”

“She will die!” I said.

“Yes! And if you don’t give her morphine?”

“She will still die.”

“Exactly!”

I hung up and thought that I had given the wrong answer to the nurse. My mother dying from too much morphine wasn’t the worst thing. She was bound to die very soon anyway. The worst thing was that it would be me who killed her if she died from too much morphine. But this would be the worst thing for me, not for my mother.

Administering morphine was easy—a few drops into her mouth from a tiny syringe. She stopped moaning and moving her arms. Her features relaxed. Yet there was something about her expression and the position of her body that frightened me. It looked as if she was farther away now. It looked as if by giving her morphine I had pushed my mother farther into that other world.