The End and the Beginning
‘I think therefore I am.’ (Descartes)
And I am Joe White
I knew that with every injection I was killing her but it had to happen. A life ceases to become important if it loses its spirit to love and she had lost hers a long time ago. Together we were spiralling out of existence to a place neither of us could remain.
It was looking in the mirror that brought the grief. I could bring the blade down over the thickening stubble and wonder how I had spent so many years locked in such a painful prison, playing her game for so long, living a lie from which an escape seemed improbable. It didn’t help that I had vacillated between loving her and loathing her. We had so many good times, so many moments to cherish but, as I had grown and developed as a person, she had remained in the past and there was no meeting point on the curve to keep us together.
It is hard to say when the loathing overtook the loving and when the necessity for a resolution first formulated itself in my mind. There were so many good things about her, so many things that others would mourn. She was someone’s daughter, someone’s friend and, at times, I loved her. All those she had touched would find her passing tragic. There would be a hole in their lives that she had once filled but there would be a space in mine for a brave new world; and that’s where the inner ‘me’ was extremely selfish.
It is difficult to explain to the outside observer why such a course was necessary. It can be too easy to get caught up in the morality of it all, to fail to see the suffering; but the reality for me had grown more overwhelming every day; and this premeditated act was my one chance to achieve happiness. I had struggled for so long to earn it; and I had struggled with God too, or at least with the penetrative voice in my mind that bore my conscience. What God had created no man should destroy. It was the repetitive thought whirring around my head; but I had long since given up on a God; or at least a God that cared. In fact, for me God was the destroyer and I was the creator of my new life. Or maybe I was just Frankenstein’s monster with a syringe.
As a child I had read murder mysteries and found a strange curiosity in the minds of those capable of such a crime. The deviousness, the calculated cruelty, the lack of emotion for their victim; and yet in each callous deed there was an emotion, there was the passion to kill in the first place. I was fourteen when I realised that all killers had deep feelings, although they were never for the emotions of their victims. It was their own selfish hearts they nurtured, they never saw into the lives of those they took. The murderer’s depth of emotion was for their own deluded feelings.
Unfortunately I am not deluded. This decision to end a life has been a long and protracted battle. Rachel has fought her cause admirably; but I can’t cope with her anymore and I don’t want to make any further excuses for her existence. I want her removed from me so that I can find what I have always wanted - a woman to love me; because that’s what all this is about. It is the need to be loved; loved and desired for the adult that I have become. I have outgrown Rachel.
The first injection caused nightmares. I was becoming the monster that everyone else would see. In my dreams I played out the scenarios of the disbelieving faces, the cold eyes and the venomous words; and yet, when I stood at the foot of the bed, the small needle in my hand, I didn’t feel a monster. I felt the time had come to release her from this life. Rachel wasn’t happy.
The needle pricked the skin so softly. No major loss of blood or dramatic searing of the flesh; just one tiny blue mark. There wasn’t even a wince of pain. She took it as I knew she would with resignation and a sense of release. That was my persuasiveness. I had talked her into the reasoning that all this was for the best, that she had suffered so much and that there would be a relief in the next life; but there were nights when I lay in our bed and thought of her body slowly dying, and the fluid coursing through her veins and I shrivelled with the thought that I was taking her one step further away. Within a year she would cease to exist and I would be left to live my life on my own.
Of course there was the fear of loss. Living with a familiar pain is often easier than altering the burden and bringing about a change that cannot be reversed; and death is irreversible. If she died I could not bring her back. If I killed her I would be free to live my own life again but I would be cut adrift from all that I knew. I could not stay in my home with sacrificial blood upon the carpet. I would have to leave. That was the bold step I was taking. The injections were easy in comparison. Closing my life and starting again was the scary part.
How many people out there will sit in judgement of me and yet they are living in lives that they don’t really want and are afraid to make the bold first move that will alter their world. There is a piper calling their tune, a weak and feeble tune that their tired legs run behind, tripping and falling on the way; whereas I am now the master of my own destiny. My own parents spent years in a failed marriage, scared to face a future alone. I was not going to perpetuate their misery. If all it took was a well-placed needle then I was going to face the consequences of my actions, happy in the certainty that I would not remain like them. I would not die from inactivity or passivity.