All You Need - Short Story by Lynda Tavakoli

 

All You Need

Short Story

by Lynda Tavakoli

 

 

Footfall.  My father’s favourite word.  A word he said rested in your mouth like a snowflake, dissolving its taste onto the tongue before speech.   

“We heard your footfall on the porch,” he would tell me proudly on my calling days. “We feel the softness of you when you come to the door.”   

He wrote poetry.  Sad, sweet, sometimes unforgivably sentimental poetry about his life, loves and his wife, but I learned more about my parents through reading those poems than at any other time during the fifty years of being their daughter.    

“That father of yours is such a romantic,” my mother used to say with the smile that was forever dancing around the edges of her mouth.   The smile that in profile became her miserable or cheerful face as the result of the stroke she was felled by eight years earlier.   We made a game of it, laughing as she swivelled her head from side to side; sad face/happy face/sad face.  But really there was only one face that mattered and that was the one that was screaming underneath. 

I can’t say that it should have been much of a surprise when the subject eventually came up.  Death had never been an uncomfortable issue within the family as my father, a scientist by profession, allowed himself a healthy cynicism towards most things and my mother had simply always been, well, pragmatic.  And it was something they passed it on to me, their ordinary nonchalance about their not so ordinary lives.  For although the stroke had incapacitated his wife in ways that even he as her carer found difficult, it was only when his personal nemesis prolonged its visit that the real challenges began. The stealth of it shocked us all when finally, we realised that my mother’s misfortunes were but a bubble in the clots that conspired in my father’s arteries and were furtively furring up his brain.  

“You see the irony in this,” he said to me one day when he could. “The same bastard is going to murder us both.” 

I tried to call in most afternoons after work when my father's day would welcome the sound of a human voice.  Since the stroke my mother had been unable to produce a single intelligible word, something that had proved infinitely more challenging than the flaccid appendages that now greatly inhibited the dexterity of her movements.   Any communication was therefore performed through the slow scratch of pencil on paper as her still sharp brain fought to make its presence continually felt.  Yet my parents’ lives were bound by an understanding beyond my own and its unravelling became the catalyst for what would eventually define us all.  

I was used to seeing my father feed my mother, her snailed lettering having hours earlier suggested a menu for the meal.  I had seen a spoon carefully enter the cave of her mouth and heard the slow slurp of liquidised food ingested into her throat, and see again my father’s big hand carefully wipe away dribbles with his thumb.  So, when I called in one lunch time unexpectedly and found my mother sitting alone at the table eyeing a plate of cold food I was, to say the least, worried.  I found my father in the kitchen hunched over the sink, white froth fizzing from his fingers as he washed some dishes. 

“Wasn’t mama hungry then?” I asked, when finally he became aware of my presence in the doorway.  

“Who?” 

“Don’t be daft daddy.  You know who.”  But he didn’t.  Not then anyway. 

After that the periods of memory loss became like a train journey of unscheduled stops and starts, the track connecting the stations shrinking with accelerated ease.  Between them though, my parents somehow managed to be the two halves of a dysfunctional whole and life for them both seemed, to the outside world at least, sufferable.  I had insisted on extra help from Social Services, a necessary intrusion which had been reluctantly accepted but without which would have made normal day to day living at home impossible.   

A few months after the incident in the kitchen I arrived at the house with a present for my parents’ fifty-fifth wedding anniversary.  By then conversations with my father had become a kind of guessing game with me never quite knowing the person I might arrive to see.  Most days it was the intelligent and articulate man who had nurtured and loved me all my life; the scientist-cum-poet with the big voice and even bigger heart. Sometimes not.  On that day it was the former who greeted me, dunking down under the celebratory balloons dangling from the ceiling of the porch. 

“Happy anniversary, daddy,” I said and kissed him on both cheeks. 

“And what a wonderful day it is,” he boomed, all smiles as though the sun had surprised the sky during a thunderstorm. 

My mother was dressed in her favourite lavender blouse and coordinating purple skirt.  She was sitting in a chair by the window so that the smiley side of her face was all I could see.  

Slivers of silver shone through the usual dull greyness of her hair as if she had been earlier carefully preened and pampered.   My father did not preamble. 

“You’re a good daughter,” he said. 

“Thank you.”  

“Your mother and I love you very much.” 

“I know that.” 

“So, we know that you’ll help us when we can’t help ourselves.” It was a statement I afterwards thought.  There was no ambiguity of a question in his voice.  “Your mother and I have made a pact.” 

 It could not have been more clearly put and yet I struggled to take in the real implication of the words. The dryness that had suddenly claimed my mouth was precluding a response. 

“We’ve had discussions,” he went on. “These moments of clarity on my part are becoming less and less as you’ve witnessed but what we’ve decided was decided a long time ago, we want you to know that - even before you were born. It was always going to be a leaving of two souls together if it came to this.”   And there it was in all its starkness and eloquence - death by proxy. 

“What is it that you’re telling me?” 

If I had for a second doubted their love, their devotion for each other, I would never have considered it. Their lives, after all, had been placed unconditionally in my hands and it was not something that could be borne lightly or without much searching of my own soul. As it was, I needed time to research the facts proffered to me outside of what I already knew, which was that my parents’ lives had become intolerable and it would only get worse.   

“Dignitas,” my father had said, “has denied us because of my own mental deterioration. You are our only hope.  I’m sorry.” 

I am ashamed to say that for the few days after this revelation my thinking consisted of a single thought and that was the judgement of others.  Helping one’s loved ones to end their lives was surely the most heinous of crimes, punishable not only legally but in the eyes of whoever’s god had an opinion.  But in the end, I could only hear my father’s words telling me, without sentiment or self-pity, that they’d both had enough. 

“How?” I asked once the decision was made.  

“Here,” he said. 

The small stockpile of drugs was secreted behind probably the one place my father could remember to return to during lucid moments - his bulky and ancient radio.  He had been accumulating the Class B drugs over the Internet for several months apparently since the refusal from Dignitas, and had been writing down quite matter-of-factly, what I should do.  The timing would be up to my mother.  She would choose a day when the signals to her husband’s brain were failing to do much more than simply forgetting to feed her lunch.  And there would be a sign; two circles pencilled on the notepad that remained permanently next to my mother’s hand.  Two circles.  Just to be sure.  

It was surprising how different everything seemed after the agreement.  Even the folk from Social Services in their ignorance remarked at how relaxed my parents had suddenly become, and it might have been easy then for me to renege.  Yet I did not.  Instead, I read the detailed instructions I had been given - a sheet that ended with two names signed side by side with a kiss.  For me or for each other, I wasn’t entirely sure. 

It was Good Friday and the rota for Social Services allowed for an early finish before I took over to oversee the remainder of the day.  I exchanged pleasantries with the home help at the door and wondered had my parents heard me coming or had my footfall at last been consigned to a hazy poetic remembrance.  They were in their bedroom, my father curled like a foetus on the side of the bed that faced my mother’s reclining chair. She, in turn, was angled slightly backwards with an arm resting on the tray that lay across her lap, a pencil still upright between her fingers.  They both had their eyes open.      

I pressed my lips onto my mother’s forehead and turned then to my father.  Any remaining sharpness in his eyes had been diluted into their greyness and he stared dully past me as if I wasn’t there.  His cheek was cold to the touch when I kissed it and for a brief moment I hoped that he was already dead.   

The notepad was resting at an angle beneath my mother’s hand, the scratch scratch of her nail on the paper pleading for my attention although I knew what I would see before I looked.  And they were there of course; two tiny circles almost touching and I wondered at the effort it had taken just for that.   

“Mama,” I said. “Are you sure?” 

People will ask how I knew; how the certainty was unequivocal, and I can only say that for the first time in many long years I witnessed the gift my mother had freely given me throughout most of my life – a smile that lit up almost the whole of her face like a promise.   

Following the instructions, I switched on the radio to their favoured Classical station and let the music play quietly in the background as I made up the medication.  Then to lessen its bitter taste, I dipped my finger into honey and dabbed it onto their lips.  I gave the mixture to my mother first, placing a straw gently inside her mouth so that she could suck the liquid in herself and then I turned to rouse my father, helping to ready him on the edge of the bed. Neither of them gagged, even though the experience could not have been pleasant to the senses and I waited until everything had been imbibed before leaving the room because that was what they had asked. 

There could be no nice ending to it.  No twist of the tale to make the story okay.  When I returned to the bedroom later both of their spirits had flown and I knew my father would have enjoyed the poetry in that.  I sat for a while before making the phone call, afraid suddenly for myself but glad too, knowing that they would have done the same for me.  For love.  Only love.

Lynda Tavakoli lives in County Down, Northern Ireland, where she facilitates an adult creative writing class and is a tutor for the Seamus Heaney Award for schools.

A poet, novelist and freelance journalist, Lynda’s writings have been published in the UK, Ireland, the US and the Middle East, with Farsi and Spanish translations. She has been winner of both poetry and short story prizes in Listowel, The Westival International Poetry Prize and runner- up in The Blackwater International Poetry Competition and Roscommon Poetry Competition.

Her poems have also appeared in The Irish Times, New Irish Writing. Lynda’s debut poetry collection, ‘The Boiling Point for Jam’ is published by Arlen House.