One Last Cocktail

The evening he was diagnosed they had had dinner on their sail boat.  Sharing a bottle of Merlot, plotting the path across the final wine dark sea.  The determined moment to be the point when neither recognized the face of the one they had loved so fiercely for so long.  He trusted her to know when that time became inevitable.  They pledged each other dignity and absolution.  There would be no rhetorical, moral hand wringing.  Both were aware of the storms that would face them, each in their turn.  They had been left childless by nature.  Nature had destroyed his mind and deformed her cells.  Families had long since preceded them in death.  By choice they would cease just as they had flourished, together alone.  Their love to transcend the corporeal. 

As he wasted away she became diminished.  Growing  intertwined over the years, inevitably becoming detached from the world around them.  He became vacant, bewildered, incessant and repetitive.  His imaginative creations turned hallucinations, confusing and frightening him.  She weakened by malignant cells that had metastasized.             

In life most evenings were spent together cheering health with cocktails.  One night soon they would toast their predetermined demise.  Together creating a potion made in subterfuge, complex, lethal and absolute.  Its least deadly ingredient being its most powerful, equal parts the tears of a life time of love and memories. 

She released him from this life as he had wished.  His dying vision her eternally peaceful hazel eyes that had for so many years brought him such passion, joy, peace, kindness and unbound love.  His only regret that he would lack the capacity to return the kindness. 

“I love you”. 

Her exquisite thumb depressed the plunger. 

“I shall not be long.  Tonight we will sail galaxies.”