The Blackbird
A short story
This is a story about assisted dying. Some readers might find it distressing.
Rose struggles up through the fog and opens her eyes to sunlight and gold. The cherry tree outside the bedroom window is losing the last of its leaves. It gleams with a lustrous sorrow as it relinquishes them one by one and lets them drift to the ground on shafts of sunlight.
Will it be like that? A letting go, a downward flow into oblivion.
She feels a sense of solidarity with the tree. Each dying day is like those leaves, precious because they are so few, and so soon to be gone.
She hadn’t expected this ecstasy, this clinging to every rare moment of life. She knows how the end will come but not when. It will surely be soon, though. The pain is bearable. It’s the helplessness and humiliation that are defeating her. It’s right to do it this way, before it destroys them all, especially Laura.
They have the paperwork. All they have to do is phone the doctor and then wait for him to come. Everything has been planned…