Afterward

Afterward smelled like death, which smelled like morphine, which smelled like raspberry, which I’ve never liked. These artificial fruit smells—chemical esters volatile and ripe—they smell of a rotting, and now death, because it is all I smelled as I carried out the work necessary for the hospice nurse to go home. No one thinks about this. You think that death is the end of the play: you put on your coat and go home. Perhaps it is the end, but everyone wants to go home, which is more difficult when you are already there. There is no coat to put on. It is hot, in fact. You roll up your sleeves. You help the young and shaken Malaysian nurse squirt raspberry-flavored morphine out of syringes and into a toilet bowl, and then you sign a form to say that it is all gone. This is what they do in Cook County. You ask if this is safe for the water supply; everyone looks at you, faces blank as the moon you can’t see outside.

I say these things about you, but I don’t know what you would do. I am projecting. This is what I did: I walked through rooms full of ghosts with the authority of the living. I stomped around and signed forms. I was a witness. I wiped down a plastic commode and put it in a closet. I loaded the dishwasher and listened to the body bag zip. Body bags were something from crime scenes, but if your mother dies of cancer in her apartment, they will put her in a body bag. Everyone will be in some kind of body bag. Everything is a body bag, if you think about it hard. Your bed, your clothes, your life. They all fasten and close.