Remission: Impossible

Aunt Hazel's funeral was a closed-casket affair.  She had wasted away to almost nothing during her last few months and there was no magic that could be expected out of even the best of morticians to change that.

I sat in the front row.  I was breaking out in a cold sweat and felt like I was going to throw up at any moment.  Grief can do this to a person.  That was my story and I was sticking to it.

On a small table to one side of her coffin stood a portrait-sized photograph taken of her a few years back when she was healthy.  At that time, she had already buried two husbands and a third was on the way.  I believe his name was Gus but I can't remember for sure.  I do recall verbatim what was on his suicide note but that's not hard to do.  All it said was, "Free at last."

She was showing her teeth in the picture, her hair was immaculately coiffed,  and she had one eyebrow raised in disapproval.  It was how everyone best remembered her, everyone that is except me.

When Hazel got sick, she had given up on marriage so it fell upon the family to nominate a primary caregiver.  I was chosen because I was out of work at the time.  I had also borrowed money from most of my relatives and had shown no signs of ever paying it back.  That might have caused some resentment on their part.

At first, it didn't seem like such a bad deal.  I got free room and board while my aunt battled her cancer.  Groceries were delivered and a nurse was hired to look in on her every other day so my duties were pretty much nonexistent. If Hazel decided to projectile vomit or shit all over herself, all I had to do was close the bedroom door to block the smell until the cleanup detail arrived. 

Everything was fine until the boredom kicked in.  My aunt's house was at least twenty miles from anything and I had no money or car.  There was no internet access, no cable TV, and the only things to read were a leatherette-bound bible and a bunch of self-help books inspiring people to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps.  The only alcohol on the premises was some cooking sherry I polished off in the first two days.  As a result, I spent most of my time staring out the living-room window watching her beloved rose garden slowly wither away.

I think I would have lost my mind if she had not gone into hospice care.  Hazel was dying; it was official now.  The chemo didn't work and keeping her on it would serve no purpose other than to increase her suffering.  The plan now was to keep her as comfortable as possible for the time she had left.

That didn't mean my ordeal was over, not by any stretch.  Terminal cases can linger for weeks, months, even years.  What made things different was the drugs.

Whoever makes the rules about who gets what is real stingy when it comes to opiates. When it looked like Hazel might recover, they gave her synthetic codeine for the pain and Thorazine for the nausea.  Yes, Thorazine.  I thought nobody prescribed that stuff since the days of Nurse Ratched but apparently I was wrong.  There was nothing on her medicine shelf worth stealing. 

With her terminal diagnosis came morphine and plenty of it.  The nurse showed me how to administer the drug.  It wasn't by injection.  The device looked like a large hypodermic but instead of a needle, it had a curved plastic needle for its contents to be given orally.

I was a quick study.  The nurse watched me to make sure I was administering the morphine properly and commended me for getting it right the first time.  After she left, I celebrated by giving myself a dose as well.

Suddenly my predicament wasn't so awful.  I sat down on the floor and stared at the wall for a while.  Life was good.

There was only one problem.  The nurse didn't bring enough morphine for both of us so more often than not, my aunt had to do without.

You'd think a stalwart old battleaxe like Hazel would take it like a trooper.  Instead, she wailed like a banshee about the pain for hours on end.  It was pretty hard to listen to her carry on like that so I increased my dosage to the point where it didn't bother me so much.  This of course left almost zero morphine for her but she really brought that upon herself when you think about it. 

During one of her more lucid moments, Hazel caught on that I was using her medication and threatened to tell the nurse about it.  I denied it of course but she was unconvinced.  I had no choice but to dope her up so she wouldn't be in any condition to tell anybody anything.  She struggled a bit but there wasn't much fight left in the old girl.  I was able to hold her down with my hand on her forehead while squirting enough morphine into her mouth to knock her unconscious.  I didn't administer enough to kill her though.  That would be wrong.

It was a good thing I hadn't used the entire morphine supply for myself.  From that day on, I made sure to keep enough in supply so my aunt would sleep peacefully through every nurse's visit.  

Aunt Hazel passed away about a month later.  I'll never forget seeing her go through her death rattle.  It was a hell of a thing to watch so I took a hit of morphine to calm my nerves.  Just before she expired, her eyes shot open and she stared me right in the face with the hypo nozzle hanging from the corner of my lip.  I waved bye-bye.  Then she died.

In the end, my aunt had the last laugh.  She had gone on to whatever reward awaited her and left me with a morphine addiction.  My drug supply had been cut off.  The grocery delivery had also stopped and her house was to be sold to pay for her medical expenses, which meant I had to secure a place to live and a way to support myself.  Neither of these are easy when you're a junkie.

So here I was, sitting at her funeral hoping my family would interpret my withdrawal symptoms as heartfelt bereavement.  I think I pulled it off.  I didn't notice anyone giving me suspicious glances between their outpourings of crocodile tears.

After the service, Hazel's brother Bob came over and sat down next to me.

"I want you to know how much the entire family appreciates what you've done," he said.  "Please try to take comfort that she has gone on to a better place."

"I'm just so sorry she's gone," I said, shaking in my seat.

"I know, I know you are," he said.

He didn't know the half of it.