The longer this goes, the worse it will be. I know logically that it would be cruel to keep this up. All the resuscitation has put my mother’s body through hell. Maybe I’m selfish for wanting to hold on. Maybe it’s not love that’s keeping her here. Maybe it’s just me and my brothers, how unwilling we are to let her go.
God, I fucking hate this.
Lachlan presses his hands to his mouth, his eyes pinched at the corners. I wonder if he wants to answer for us all, or if he can’t.
“I’ll let you talk,” Dr. Andrews says patiently. I watch him withdraw to my mother’s room, just at the door, speaking in low tones to another passing nurse. We won’t even have privacy for this. Not really.
Lachlan shakes his head. “We can’t keep doing this.”
“No,” Finn blurts immediately, a spark of anger in his pained tone. “No, we can’t pull the plug. We can’t just let her go—”
“Finn, you know it’s going to get worse,” I tell him. “She’s going to suffer if we keep going.”
Connor helplessly lifts one shoulder in a shrug. “Do we really want to keep doing this to her? I mean, think about it, Finn.”
“It’s just more pain,” Lachlan murmurs. “All of it, for what?”
Finn shakes his head. “No. No, listen to yourselves. You really want to do this? Just end—”
“It’s been the end,” Lachlan replies. “We’ve just denied it.”
“It’s not denial if there’s a chance!”
“I think that chance is gone,” I say quietly. Every word feels like a dagger in my throat. I feel like shit, like I’ve betrayed my mother. Like I’m giving up. But I know it’s true.
“Then what have we been doing this for?” Finn asks, his voice shaking.
“Ourselves,” Lachlan says quietly. He feels as guilty as I do. I know it. “We’ve known since the beginning that it was bad. The doctors told us. But we couldn’t let go.”
I can remember that day clearly. I remember what it felt like, one blow after another.
There was no time. No time to think about what was right. We only did what we could and hoped one day, we’d get back the loss that hit us when we were already down.
We were waiting for something big, and it’s happened.
“We’ve dragged this out long enough,” Connor says softly. His hand is on Finn’s elbow. I half expect Finn to hit him. “It’s not what she would want.”
“She’d want to be in heaven, with her husband,” Lachlan adds. “With our father.”
“Not stuck here in a hospital,” I say. “Attached to machines.”
We’ve never said the words aloud. It feels dirty to say these things, to speak about her like some thing and not our mother. Like someone else’s loved one, some other body attached to all those tubes and machines.
But itisher. It’s our mother, with her bright smile and laughing eyes. She is the one confined to the bed, to these walls.
She wouldn’t want this.
“No,” Finn says, his voice cracking. “Shit. That’s all shit. They aren’t god. They don’t know everything.”
“No. But are you okay putting her through this again and again?” Lachlan asks quietly.
Finn blinks away tears. I can see him breaking inside. I know he’s accepted this just like us, but he can’t let it go so easily.
Connor’s hand rests on Finn’s shoulder. He squeezes, his own eyes shining. “Finn. You know this is the right thing to do.”
“And we do it together,” I say hoarsely. “We’re family. We have to do this. For her.”
Finn presses a hand to his forehead. He looks into the distance, maybe seeing some memory he holds dear. His voice is almost a whisper. “It’s not right.”
