Page 69 of The Moonlight Healers

“Mom, please, you wouldn’t be—”

“It’s not your decision, Barbara. It’s mine. And how beautiful it is, to be able to end my life on my terms and save the life of someone Louise loves.”

Louise tried to focus her thoughts as the full weight of her grandmother’s words landed on her. “Could I even do it…?” she asked, trying to voice the unbearable question. “How would I even…? I mean, killing someone, is it something I could…?”

Louise’s mother stopped pacing, as though she could no longer outrun what was coming. She stood very still as she turned to face Louise. “You could,” she said softly. “Because I did.”

Louise watched her mom, uncomprehending. She didn’t understand. How could she have done what her grandmother was asking: end a life?

Bobbie crossed the room and sat beside Louise again. She took her hands, glancing once at Camille before she spoke.

“I couldn’t tell you, Louise. Not this. Not when you…” She cleared her throat. “Not when you looked at me the way you used to look at me, when I was still a nurse, like I was your hero. You used to dress up in my scrubs, use my stethoscope to listen to everyone’s heart and lungs. You looked at me like I hung the moon.”

She glanced again at Camille, and Louise saw a decade’s worth of anger and regret in her mother’s eyes.

“I was working a night shift. Assigned to a patient in the ICU.” She hesitated, and Louise squeezed her mother’s hands, willing her to continue, to finally give her the answers she had wanted for so long. “Her name was Teresa. She was very old, almost ninety, with advanced dementia. Heart failure. COPD.” She closed her eyes as though forcing herself to remember despite the pain of it. “She was so sick, and she was with us for months. Her family wouldn’t talk about end of life, or agree to hospice. They wanted everything done, and I watched this poor woman get a feeding tube placed, and a tracheotomy in her neck. She had pressure ulcers everywhere, no matter how careful we were with her skin. It was awful, Louise. It broke my heart. More than anything I’d experienced as a nurse.”

Louise thought of Sarah, the focus of all her care on comfort instead of curative measures. She was at home, surrounded by her family, with a team of hospice doctors and nurses managing her pain. She couldn’t imagine someone she loved being kept alive to suffer the way her mother described.

“I was giving her a bath, cleaning up her bed, the little things I could offer her, that felt so insignificant, but at least were something.” Her grip tightened even more. “And I just felt this needto put my hands on her, to stay longer than I normally would, so she wouldn’t feel alone.”

Louise was only vaguely aware of her grandmother coming to sit on the other side of her on the couch. She couldn’t tear her eyes from her mother as she spoke.

“I can hardly describe it,” Bobbie continued hoarsely. “Only that I felt…surrender, like she had been waiting all that time for someone to simply let her go. And I saw her…flashes of her life, pieces of her. Felt this warmth, like nothing I had ever known.” Her features softened. “I thought I was delirious. Too many night shifts. But her heart stopped. Almost as soon as I let go of her.”

“Mom…” Louise began to speak, to tell her mother that it was okay, that she had given her peace, and no one would blame her.

“It happened a second time,” Bobbie said quickly, as though she needed to get all the words out at once. “A few weeks later with a similar patient. I didn’t understand it. It was a coincidence, right? But because they both died unexpectedly of cardiac arrest, with no identifiable cause, at night while I was alone with them, there was an investigation by the hospital.”

Louise’s heart plummeted. She couldn’t imagine the shame her mother must have felt, to be implicated in the deaths of her patients. She felt the pieces of her childhood fall into place, why her mother quit nursing, why she had been so shattered after they moved, the long stretches of depression.

“I was cleared,” Bobbie said tersely after a few moments. “They couldn’t find any evidence of wrongdoing. But of course, something like that stays with you. Follows you around. I never could work as a nurse after that, even in a new hospital, new city. I couldn’t let it go, the horror of what I’d done. Even if it helped them, even if it was the choice I would make for myself, I never would have…” Her eyes glistened. “Consent still matters. What a family wants matters. They weren’t on hospice. They were in an ICU.”

“You didn’t know,” Louise managed to ask, “about healing?”

Bobbie shook her head. “Not then. Not until it was too late.”

“I told her,” Camille said in a strained voice from beside Louise. “When she told me what happened after the second patient. I told her immediately. About all of it.”

Louise thought of the journal, the last entry, her grandmother’s plea for forgiveness.

“You had no choice then, did you?” Bobbie asked, the anguish clear in her tone.

“I’ve never forgiven myself, Bobbie. You have to know that. And I promise if I had known that there was any possibility something like that could happen… My mother always taught me intention mattered, and awareness… She never thought either… She would have insisted I tell you. She loved you so much, was so proud of you.”

Bobbie released Louise and placed her hands on her mother’s. It was the first time Louise had seen the two women touch in more than a decade.

“You’re not still angry?” Camille’s voice was almost pleading.

Bobbie wiped her eyes. “I know you were doing your best. And I failed too. In almost the exact same way, by thinking I was protecting Louise, withholding this all from her. I was so mad at you, Mama. But then I acted so much like you.” She tried to smile. “Which made me even more mad at you. But I love you. And I’m so sorry I couldn’t find a way to tell you that sooner. I thought we had so much more time.”

She looked at Louise. “I’m so sorry, honey. For not telling you. I just couldn’t separate it, how I found out, what had happened, with the healing itself. To me it was more like a curse, this horrible moment in my life that I couldn’t ever leave behind. I felt like I lost everything, my career, my friends from work, my relationship with my mother. And I was so consumed by guilt. I could barely remember how to breathe after I found out. You were the only…” Her voice was hoarse. “You were theonly reason I was able to keep going. This bright, beautiful reprieve. And every time I thought of telling you, it just felt like…”

“It would make her life harder,” Camille whispered.

Bobbie nodded as she wiped her eyes again. “I hated keeping it from you. Taking you away from our life here. All I ever wanted was for you to be happy, and safe. I thought I could pretend for both of us, convince myself it never happened. Move on.”

Louise knew that her mother’s trauma didn’t erase the years of lies. But mostly she felt a deep, overwhelming sense of grief, that her mother had been so alone, that she hadn’t been able to share that pain with anyone. Even if she wished she had told her, she also understood why she hadn’t. She thought of Peter, how terrified she had been to be honest with him about her feelings, how she had chosen the stability of their friendship over the danger of an unknown future. She and her mother had both convinced themselves that the safety of a lie was preferable, that honesty was a dangerous, reckless proposition. But they were both wrong, to believe life could be so easily partitioned, that love could flourish without risk, that joy could exist without sorrow.

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