The Duchess lives in room sixteen, just at the top of the first flight of stairs. She hasn’t done anything for a long time. She can’t eat anymore. She can’t move. For a while after the second stroke, she’d make sounds, almost words sometimes. Then she’d move her mouth and shake her head like she was trying to wake herself up from a nightmare. Now she doesn’t even do that. She made it clear—back when she could still make things clear—that she didn’t want to be kept alive in a “vegetative state” and that this is where she wanted to die. The Swans are having a meeting on Sunday to decide how to kill her. Rose says I can’t come.

Her room is light. They put her bed by the big window but it’s not like she can turn her head to enjoy the view. Some things we do are to make things easier for the person in pain and other things are to make it easier for the people who love them. They always keep fresh flowers in her room, lilacs today. They’re really perfume-y and they’re making me feel a bit high.

“Hi. It’s me. It’s my lunch hour.” Talking aloud when no one hears you makes everything sound really loud. But it doesn’t matter. I put my stuff down at the foot of the bed and take her hands into mine. They’re so small and almost brown between the dark spots and the tape that holds her IV needle in place. And so delicate it’s almost hard to touch them, like they’re made of warm water or glass that’s not quite set. There’s a flat brown mole on the fleshy part below her right thumb that I never noticed before. I check that no one’s in the doorway before I give it a tiny kiss. Then I start clipping.

“It finally stopped raining. It’s hot today, hardly any clouds.” The clock on the wall clacks. The machine that monitors her heart beeps in horrible syncopation with the clock. The machine that breathes for her sucks and drops, a blue accordion in a tube. The snap of the nail clippers sends sharp crescents flying onto the bedspread or the floor. She’s still growing, even now, still doing something all on her own. But it’s nothing to get all optimistic about. It doesn’t mean anything.

I gather up the clippings and take them to the trash can. On the shelf above it there’s a bottle of hand sanitizer that I forgot to use before I cut her nails. We’ll just keep this between us. I sit in the chair next to her bed, pick up the book I’ve been reading to her, and start where I left off yesterday:

When someone sleeps they become a child again, perhaps because in sleep one can do no evil and one is unaware even of one’s own existence. By some natural magic, the worst criminal, the most inveterate egoist is made sacred by sleep.