The Final Request

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by Diane Payne

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Sitting on the patio overlooking the desert with my young daughter and our elderly friend, who is full of life reciting lines from her favorite Irish poets, as the two of us drink a glass of wine, and my daughter draws a picture, until she sees a roadrunner, and we all laugh, thoroughly immersed in this moment of joy.

Sitting on the patio overlooking the lake with my dog and elderly friend, she feeds the dog endless snacks while we drink wine, telling me hilarious stories about growing up in Vermont with her undertaker father and all the dead bodies that had been inside their family house. The dog hops on the patio chair next to her, and she tells me to hurry and take a photo of the two of them, both all smiles, which is the greatest thing on earth.

Sitting on the beach with the dog, eight-foot waves caressing the shore, I remember when my Arizona friend asked me to go to Mexico to buy drugs that would end her life peacefully before her family moved her into a nursing home. I think of my Michigan friend asking me to help her end her life with pills when “the time came”, dreading dying of dementia like her close friends and husband. Then I remember an old dog that well-intentioned friends suggested I put down, but I wasn’t ready, and he didn’t seem ready, until one day while gathered at a friend’s pond, my daughter and I discovered he wasn’t with our other dog and had disappeared, and our friends said he went out to the woods to die, which I refused to believe, and spent the next few weeks frantically searching, calling his name, over and over, the same way my friends kept calling my name, pleading, I just want to die peacefully.

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