Satisfying Her Needs

He always did the best he could. He prided himself on that. Belinda always said so, too. She trusted him. Why would she not, since he was always there for her. And in the end, after everything was said and done who was there for her if not him?

Of course that's just what people would expect in any event, since they'd been together for thirty years. If any couple of their acquaintance had a good, solid relationship it was they who qualified for the gold medal. The very picture of a handsome, well-adjusted, successful couple in an enviable marriage.

She was high-powered, a happy extrovert. And he was low-key, more of an introvert. They complemented one another. People always said so, in any event. Well, of course they did. It advantaged both of them to take from each other what was offered. That was what love was all about, wasn't it?

He never had coveted her easy way with people and their obvious delight in her personality. It just wasn't his way, the way he was oriented. She seemed to subliminally accept that everyone would like her. He viewed everyone with an instinctive distrust. She always said it was more nurture than nature, given their respective and so different upbringings, their family histories. He wasn't so sure; she was just born that way and he the way he was.

You'd think, wouldn't you, that she would have far less trouble adapting to the brutal turn her health had taken. Instead, it just devastated her. She went into such a state of shock he hardly recognized her. Gone, the breezy personality that always made light of his concerns. Gone the determination to see everything through, even the vicissitudes in their relationship that had him ready to leave it all.

She was the one who pulled them together time after time. And he had to admit everything had turned out well despite his misgivings. Ted and Trudy were on their own now, and they were about to become grandparents. Boggles the mind. But they were gone, Ted living now in Halifax and Trudy in Boston with her politically-engaged husband. So who was left to look after Belinda? Him.

It wasn't easy, she became so different than what he'd become accustomed to over the years. Her breezy self-confidence that had resulted in one successful business venture after another, leaving his earnings as a chartered accountant looking like a wan contrast in professional capabilities - one of the confidence-sapping thorns in their marriage - had suddenly evaporated.

Suddenly she was this cringing, whining, fearful woman whose body was slowly decaying, clinging to him for comfort. And nothing was sufficient, no amount of sacrifice on his part, no diligent attention to her physical, medical needs, was enough to comfort her. Her incessant complaints drove him out of his mind.

It helped not one iota that she began to look her age, older than him by eight years. Her face looked grey and ravaged, not even remotely resembling the vibrant beauty that had attracted him to her. He had taken charge of doling out her medications, she wanted nothing to do with them. He injected her with the pain killing opioids that never seemed to relieve either her pain or her anxiety.

He began to dread, to cringe inwardly when he heard the sound of her voice demanding his presence. Querulously demanding to know what he was doing, why he wasn't attendant on her, as though his every thought, every consideration and movement must be consumed by her needs. He felt trapped, and even so, he resolutely refused his in-laws' offers of help.

"Where are you!?!" she demanded.
"Right here, dear", he responded, hurrying upstairs to the bedroom.
"I need you here", she insisted.
"I'm here", he said, forcing his voice to assume a comforting tone, through the constriction of his dry throat, his resentful misery.

He had no life. Her need smothered him. He felt that her discomfort, her pain, was a false construct she imposed on him, to force him to close attendance on her. What was he supposed to do? He'd already suspended his work outside the house and would likely be fired from his job. Not that they needed the income, since they were well provided for, thanks to her business acumen.

Later, he felt so consumed with guilt, with the unalterable reality that he alone was the agent of her death that he had to release himself from the despair he felt by admitting to the authorities who had never suspected, what he had done. That admission did gain him immediate relief, but then the realization that he would be seen as having committed an illegal act, frightened him.

Which was when he denied having acted in deliberation, to take her life. He was only administering to her doses that the oncologist had recommended for those instances when her pain and suffering went beyond what he felt her ebbing life-force could sustain. So what had he gained by confessing in public to something that had been accepted a month earlier as a natural death?

He cursed himself and his delicacy of conscience, now that a police investigation had been launched into what a news release termed a "possible homicide". He could see how his neighbours regarded him; the telephone that had rung incessantly with commiserating messages of sympathy went dead. Even his children, his brothers, her parents and siblings no longer called.

It was Dr. Melrose's fault. It was time for him to make another confession. That he had been innocent of intent; make that an indelible statement no one could confuse with the opaque earlier statement of a guilty conscience. The message implicit in the doctor's instructions, to take care not to mix too much of the Nozinan with the morphine.

He knew very well what he was doing when he administered that injection. She had complained at the time of his awkward fumbling, the aggressive thrust of the syringe. He could never have discussed with her anything remotely in recommendation of ending her agony, given the reality that she was closer to death with each passing day that the cancer ravaged her interior.

She didn't believe in the human right to make a conscious, informed decision to end a life when the time came. She wanted to live. She viewed the entire issue of euthanasia as repulsively sinful. She intended to beat the metastasizing cancer. She had convinced herself she would. That life would resume and continue as it always had, satisfying her needs.

Never his.