Lessons

by Ian McEwan

Soon the drugs did nothing for her pain and she longed to die. Here was the humiliation she had always feared, but pain rendered her insensible to it. He heard her beg a doctor in a small voice to release her. She tried it with the nurses, who were now her friends, to allow her an overdose that no one would know about. But the staff, kindly as always, were bound by law to their medical duty to keep her alive in pain until she dropped. They were prepared to kill her by omission, by denying her food and drink. Intense and unremitting thirst was added to her ordeal. Roland moistened her lips with a wet sponge. Her lips were cracked as though she had crawled across a desert. Her eyes were yellow. Her breath smelled of something rotting. He took the ‘nil by mouth’ sign off the foot of her bed and went to the nurse’s station to insist that she be given water whenever she asked for it. They shrugged OK, that was fine by them. Not long before, legislation had come before Parliament yet again that would have allowed Daphne to choose the moment of her death. The Church worthies in the Lords, the archbishops, fought it. They hid their theological objections behind lurid tales of greedy relatives wanting to get their hands on the money. The divines were beneath contempt.