An Ace Up Her Sleeve
Ilana frightened me for a couple of reasons. First, as an example of what one might— perhaps inevitably—become; an example that could not be easily rationalized away or ignored. Getting older frightened me; losing my looks frightened me. Losing mobility, losing agency. Second, her constant isolated thinking without any moderating influences concerned me even more. What fantasies and notions might eventually seem reasonable when left alone for so very long with only one’s own thoughts as devil’s advocate? Her husband, Martin, died about three years ago, she told me when I had first started visiting her to take care of Maso. Then a progressively debilitating array of old-age ailments got steadily added to the one-two punch of rheumatoid arthritis and fibromyalgia, she said. So Ilana made a decision. A decision to take only a portion of the medication prescribed for her, thereby slowly building up her own private cache of drugs; a decision, not tempered by external opposition, to suffer greater pain for longer periods of time in order to scratch together a large enough dose of painkillers to end it all when she felt the time had come.
I didn’t believe she would actually do this, at first, so she made me bring out the gray lockbox she kept in the right-hand bottom drawer of the old wooden desk in the darkest corner of her living room. No one would notice this box, pushed back as it was into the back of the drawer and hidden under old letters and photos and other scraps of paper. I pulled it out, put it on the coffee table in front of Ilana, and sat down beside her. She detached a small key chain from her belt loop and laboriously unlocked it, her fingers red and swollen, the skin over the knuckles shiny, and had me look inside. When the pain became just too much or when she grew too crippled to take care of herself, she said, she would take matters into her own hands. With her own drugs. She’d know the time was getting near when she could no longer lock the box.
I stared at the bottles and jars, at the tiny flat envelopes, neatly folded, taped, and dated. A clinical and impersonal future all so very regimented, as opposed to the untidiness and clutter of her past, bits of this past still in paper form stuck to the lockbox and finally relinquishing their hold as I extracted her treasure chest from the drawer; ribbon ties, ticket stubs, and forgotten notes fluttering down to settle on the rug. I looked at Ilana again, then back at the box. “Don’t look so shocked,” she snorted. “They’re prescription; it’s not like I bought them on the street.”
“Well, that’s hardly the point, is it?” I shot back.
“Yes it is,” she went on. That was the entire point. It was all a matter of control and who possessed that control. Ilana stared at the wall as she said this, her cache now held securely on her lap, her body quite still—free of the shakes for the moment—her head barely moving as the words came flowing out faster and faster as her anger rose. Did I have any idea of what it was like to lose one’s range of motion, the arcs and angles getting smaller, smaller, finally grinding to a halt in constant debilitating pain? Constant quiet agony. Did I watch my husband deteriorate before my eyes, watch him turn into an object of contention among incompetents and busybodies, all claiming they alone had the right to determine the manner in which his soul left this world? No, no, her Marty would agree with her, he was waiting patiently for her, he would not disapprove, she said emphatically, slapping down the lid on her box, no longer transfixed, and relocking it. No nursing home away from home for her. No hallway encampments of the wheelchair bound and the truly absent-minded. You were a fool if you didn’t fight back when people tried to wrest your reality from you. That belief, and that belief alone, was what got her through her attacks with some of her pills still left in the bottle.
Ilana was not behaving within the normal range of expectations. Her world had always seemed on superficial glance so typically an old woman’s world: dreary, worn out; the very air of the house old and stale, the smell of talcum powder and previously-cooked food ever-present through it. The vigor and passion of her defiance was unseemly, and I resented her laying this burden of knowledge on me. What was I supposed to do now? Watch Ilana medicate herself into oblivion? Turn her in for her own good? I’d always been a coward, but I loved outlaw dreams. I had to assume Ilana, having lived for some eighty years on the planet, knew exactly what her own good was. I would not betray her to appease the tyranny of fate. I decided to keep mum.
But Ilana’s secret poisoned my peace of mind and corrupted my relationship with Ross. I never told him what I’d found out that day, a day now seemingly a thousand years ago, because I was uncertain of his reaction. We dealt every day with people miraculously holding on to the barest threads of life under unimaginable conditions. Straining the last ounce of energy, thought, to keep that scared heartbeat pounding. He knew better than me the seductive song the death siren at times must float out across the void. I knew he hated it. I knew he could be frozen in his tracks by the sudden dulcet sound of it. Would he see things the way I did, or would he go to Ilana and browbeat her out of her stash? I knew exactly what he would do.
We had always stood together. This was the first time I questioned Ross’ judgment—and I trusted his judgment above all else in this world—the first time I took it upon myself to decide for him what was the right thing to do. There were many times when I wanted to unburden myself and confess, but the withholding of this information took on the dynamics, not so much of a lie as of a disloyal tearing of our seamless cover, and I was caught in my deceit, not wanting to admit that I had kept the thing from him.
That secret was the first stone in the wall between Ross and myself that my own illness several months later would raise to what appeared to be an insurmountable height. But, now, tonight, I was going to tear it down. Not by finally exposing Ilana Dent. No. This was not a citizen’s raid I was conducting as I labored up her front walk, scratched up and shaky after extracting myself from the seaside beach plum, but rather, an actual crossing over to the other side. I wanted to pull a card out of the deck she was playing with. I too wanted a card up my sleeve.
Image: Pick any card. Source: Card Rack with a Jack of Hearts, John F. Peto, 1895. The Cleveland Museum of Art. Public domain. Edited by J. Weigley.