The tube of death pills

“I just want a pill so I can end it all Jed.”

 

At times mother got quite bleak about her condition. As someone who’d always been active, she was invariably frustrated when she couldn’t move and, understandably, humiliated when I had to clean her private places.

 

“What should I do?” I asked the boatman. “She keeps asking me to give her a pill so that she can end it all.”

 

“I have just the thing,” he said. He disappeared to the back of the boat before I could stop him.

 

“No, you misunderstand,” I shouted after him, “I don’t actually want to kill her.” It was too late to stop him, as he was already rushing off. He returned a couple of minutes later.

 

“This’ll do the trick,” he said, passing me a long, thin tube.

 

“It’s a tube of Smarties,” I said.

 

“Exactly. Next time she asks for a pill to end it all, just give her one of these.”

 

“Are they poisoned?” I asked.

 

“Don’t be a fool. Do you think I’m the sort of man that goes around handing out poisoned Smarties? It’s simply a harmless candy pill for her to take if she wants to kill herself. It has to look very different from the rest of her medication, in case she becomes paranoid that you’re trying to kill her and refuses to take them.”

 

“But won’t she be annoyed when she tries to kill herself and finds herself munching a Smartie?”

 

She won’t take them. People never do.”

 

“Do you hand out a lot of death pills?”

 

The boatman stared at me sadly. “You’d be surprised.”

 

I sometimes forget what a varied service the boatman provides to the residents of the archipelago. Of course it isn’t just me that turns to him for help with a distressed, elderly relative, or similar crisis. When you live such isolated lives as extreme off-mainlanders such as myself, then the boatman is your sole source of advice on anything from assisted suicide to de-lousing cats.

 

Later that day mother had a particularly frustrating period where she kept trying to get herself out of bed, and finding she couldn’t move.

 

“I can lift you,” I said. 

 

“I don’t want to be lifted,” she said, “you were my baby, I’m not going to become your baby.  Sometimes I wish I had a pill.”

 

“A pill?” I pretended that we hadn’t already had this conversation a dozen times.

 

“A pill so that I can end it all.”

 

“You mean one of these pills?” I placed a yellow Smartie by the side of her bed.

 

I cried myself to sleep that night. What if my mother was the only genuine suicide-wisher on the archipelago? What if the colour I’d chosen was particularly attractive to wannabe suicides? ‘I should’ve gone for the green one,’ I cursed myself a hundred times.

 

It was in nervous, anxious, frantic, state that I entered my mother’s bedroom the next morning. Of course it was only a Smartie. The worst case scenario was that she would have eaten a Smartie. In the grand scheme of things a fragile, disabled woman eating a Smartie is not a catastrophe.

 

But to me, it was the only thing that mattered in the whole world. Did my mother really want to die?

 

I could barely look, but forced myself. There, hidden under a tissue, but otherwise unmoved and unused, was a yellow Smartie.

 

I keep all of the uneaten Smarties. I have over a hundred, which I keep in a box. I could eat them of course, there’s nothing wrong with them, but somehow I feel that would be bad luck.

 

The colourful little box of sweets serves as a hundred small victories, a hundred rainbow reminders that in spite of everything, in spite of everything she says, mother actually, in some small way, is glad to be alive.

 

Of course, it could just mean she doesn’t like Smarties.