It’s been all go. After breakfast Treena brought a basin of warm water, a bar of soap and a face flannel into the bedroom. Not wanting to cede control of my personal hygiene, on top of all the other recent great and small losses of personal autonomy, even down to cutting up my own food, I have until now resisted her offer to wash me.
She pulled my T-shirt over my head. I lifted my arms and she gently soaped my armpits, an act which seemed more intimate somehow than making love. Now, with my arms aloft, seemed as good a time as any to broach the subject. ‘How about,’ I suggested conversationally, ‘if I just swallowed, say, 20 or 30 of the red, short-acting morphine capsules. Wouldn’t I gently drift off to sleep? And wouldn’t that be a nice and easy way for me to go?’
Wringing out the flannel into the bowl and starting on my back with wide circular motions, the former nurse considered my proposition, again from a strictly practical point of view.
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