Here is our third place winner in the recent WIR essay and poetry contest. We posted our first place winner last week and we’ll be posting the second place winner — a poem — next week. When you read Hildegard’s essay about an elderly friend, think about the ways in which the essay grounds us in the situation and moves toward an ending that is a surprise yet completely fits the subject.

Lucy’s Choice
by Hildegard Hingle

The first time I saw Lucy she was sitting on her front porch in a rocking chair, sipping a cup of coffee. I waved hello, she waved back. Then she pointed to the wrought iron chair next to her and shouted across the street: “Why don’t you sit down for a while if you’re not too busy.”

After that, whenever I passed through her neighborhood, I would stop and say hi, and we’d chat for a few minutes. It didn’t take long before Lucy invited me into her house, an immaculate little town house she rented from her sixty-seven year old daughter Belinda. Lucy was eighty-two years old, with short white hair and a deeply lined face that reminded me of a scorched desert landscape. Her secret weapon in her fight against wrinkles, I soon found out, was udder cream – a greasy, mysterious lotion she slathered on every night with abandon, never relinquishing hope that one day she would regain the smooth, youthful face that smiled down at us from her living room wall. “I was twenty-two years old when that picture was taken,” she told me, “and I was three inches taller then.”

Lucy and I soon entered into a routine of sorts: I’d stop by for an hour or two on Saturdays to help her clean house, pull weeds in her front yard, or fill out insurance forms. Then, on Tuesday, I’d take her to the grocery store, the bank, or the doctor’s office. Once a month, right after she deposited her Social Security check, we’d go shopping at Walmart. Lucy loved this store. By the time I arrived at her house, she’d be sitting on her porch, dressed in a sky-blue pant suit and matching pumps, shopping list in hand.

Always, our first stop was the hydrogen peroxide aisle. “How many?” I’d ask, knowing full well what her answer would be. “Half a dozen should do it, don’t you think?” she’d say, then proceed to arrange the bottles in two neat little rows inside her shopping cart. Hydrogen peroxide — in addition to udder cream — ranked as an absolute necessity in Lucy’s life. Every trip to Walmart revealed a new use for this all-purpose liquid. Lucy had already informed me that peroxide was her favorite mouthwash as well as her preferred carpet cleaner. In time I learned that it was equally useful for breaking down excess earwax, killing harmful germs, shrinking unsightly warts, and cleaning dirty toilet bowls.

Lucy had to  manage a tight budget. Her social security income of five hundred and ninety-nine dollars a month barely took care of her basic needs. “It’s not enough to live on, but too much to die,” she said. Food stamps and monthly deliveries from the local community food bank supplemented her income, but still left her short every month. After paying her rent and utilities, she was often left with less than one hundred dollars to buy groceries and the occasional luxury item — a half gallon container of Breyer’s French Vanilla Ice Cream.

It didn’t make sense to me that she would have to pay rent to her own daughter, who was financially secure and didn’t need the extra income. “I’m lucky she’s agreed to charge me only two hundred and fifty dollars,” Lucy said. “She could easily get seven hundred dollars from someone else.”

Two or three times a year Belinda would get on an airplane and visit her mother, then inevitably cut her stay short after one of their disagreements turned into yet another shouting match. Sometimes, fists were raised, and they wouldn’t speak to each other for several weeks. “She’s inherited her father’s short temper,” Lucy once told me, “He was a hothead just like her.”

Five years after I met her, Lucy was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. Surgery was immediately ruled out because of her precarious health status – she suffered from congestive heart failure – and her doctors advised against chemotherapy and radiation treatment. After learning that she was expected to live no longer than five months, Lucy decided to sign up for hospice care.

Part of the medical equipment supplied by her hospice team was a hospital bed. Since Lucy’s bedroom was too small to accommodate this bulky device, the bed was set up in her living room. I could tell right away that she was unhappy about this arrangement. The high-tech bed – now the centerpiece of her living room – extinguished any hope she might still have entertained that all was not lost. This is where you are going to die, it reminded her all day long, right here, in this gleaming metallic bed, and there is nothing you can do about it.

We tried to dress up the bed to make it look less cold and clinical. One of her neighbors brought over a rose-colored afghan with matching throw pillows to cover the waterproof sheets and metal railing. During the day, Lucy arranged a few antique dolls on top of the blanket — birthday gifts from her youngest granddaughter Hailey. On a small table, right by the foot of the bed, she lined up two of her favorite houseplants, a Lily of the Peace and an English Ivy. “They are both excellent air cleaners,” she assured me. While these extras helped soften the bed’s appearance, Lucy never overcame her dislike for what she eventually came to call her deathbed.

Although she had help during the day, at night Lucy was alone. I often stopped by in the evening to help her get ready for bed. I’d pull off the covers, then follow her detailed instructions on how to arrange her sheets and blankets so she wouldn’t get cold at night; she had lost so much weight that by now she felt chilled most of the time. One night, right before she climbed into bed, she looked at me and said: “Now you’re going to learn all about being an old woman.” Then she placed a waterproof pad on top of her already leak-proof sheets. “Something to catch the dribbles, just in case I don’t wake up in time to make it to the bathroom,” she told me.

Getting old wasn’t something I had spent a lot of time thinking about. After all, I was forty-eight years old, with a husband, a business, and two children to take care of, which left little time for contemplation. But suddenly that occasional pain in my right hip, that annoying stiffness in my lower back, and those irritating skipped beats all took on a special significance. You’re not going to get away with it either, all this was telling me, so pay attention and learn.

Lucy’s daughter, who managed her mother’s care from three thousand miles away, tried to convince her that she would be better off in a nursing home. Lucy scoffed at the idea. She had once spent ten days in a nursing home recuperating from a heart procedure, and afterward vowed she’d never set foot in a place like that again. And so, in order to prove to her daughter that she was still capable of handling her own affairs, Lucy enlisted the help of neighbors and friends.

We all had our designated areas of expertise: Helen, her eighty-one -year-old neighbor from across the street, was in charge of watering her plants and preparing lunch and dinner. Rhonda — a friend from church — took care of groceries and trips to the pharmacy, and recently widowed Alice became her designated phone-in friend; every morning, at exactly six o’clock, she would call to make sure Lucy was on track with her first batch of medications, which by now ranged from blood thinners and anti-inflammatories to tranquillizers and narcotic pain relievers.

I took care of the growing mountain of paperwork Lucy had to contend with — health insurance forms, applications for food stamps and low income assistance programs, hospice intake forms and Social Security notices. We spent an entire afternoon completing her living will, which ended up prominently displayed on her refrigerator door. Although Lucy was grateful for my help and soon began to refer to me as her “little secretary,” what she looked forward to most were my evening drop-ins. My official reason for these night-time visits was to help her get ready for bed, but we both knew this was only a pretext.

Our evening ritual — making sure she was all set for the night and had everything she needed within easy reach — gave Lucy a chance to talk about what troubled her most: her relationship with her daughter, the finite number of days she had left, her all-pervasive fear that she might have to spend her last days in a nursing home, powerless to control her final circumstances. And so she would take her time. She’d rearrange her pillows, get a glass of water, file her nails, all to postpone the inevitable, the fact that I eventually had to leave and she would face another night alone, haunted by fears and regrets, diminished by pain. “I’m not afraid to die,” she told me one night, “I’m just not ready.”

Lucy had been married more than once. There was Belinda’s father, who had died a violent death at age seventeen, and who was now nothing but a footnote in the story of her life. Ten years later, Lucy married a man named Potter (she never referred to him by his first name), a bridge worker who moved his family from one job site to the next, often several times during the course of a year. One day he left and never came back. Lucy did not like to talk about him or about the other men in her life. “I was not cut out for marriage,” she said to me one evening, “but I always liked having sex, so I had to get married, because where I come from, you don’t have sex unless you’re married.”

As Lucy’s health continued to decline, she became more and more unstable. With her Percocet intake close to the upper limit, she now appeared slightly tipsy most of the time. An increasing number of people began to echo her daughter’s opinion that she might be better off in a nursing home. Lucy refused, but her fear that Belinda would soon take steps to declare her incompetent became all-consuming. “The day Belinda puts me in a nursing home is the day I die,” she told me one evening, “and I won’t let her do it.”

When I saw Lucy the following day, she barely gave me a chance to say hello. “I’ll be leaving in one week,” she told me, waving a piece of paper in front of my face with some hastily scribbled notes on it. All I could decipher was Southwest Airlines and a flight number. “My niece from Little Rock wants me to come live with her,” she said, barely able to contain her excitement. “It’s all arranged. She’ll fly out to Phoenix and take me back home with her.”

Lucy spent the rest of the week packing clothes, sorting through her medical files and agonizing over what to take along and what to leave behind. At times she was giddy with anticipation, conjuring up glowing images of the new life that lay ahead: “You’ll have to come visit me,” she would say over and over, always ending with “I’m going to be just fine.”

“What if you don’t like it there?” I asked.

“You worry too much,” she said.

Two days before Lucy was to leave, I drove her to the bank. She withdrew two thousand dollars in cash, money she had painstakingly saved over the last seven years. “I don’t want Belinda to get a hold of this,” she said.

The day of her departure, we all stopped by early to say good bye. Lucy was wearing her special travel outfit, a pair of slate-gray polyester slacks and a long-sleeved maroon blouse buttoned all the way up to her neck; the last time I had seen her in these clothes was the day she’d taken a plane trip to Florida to visit her daughter.

As we sat around her kitchen table, Lucy looked at each one of us and made us promise that we would come visit her in Arkansas. She would only be staying with her niece for a month or two, so she told us, until she could find a place of her own. We went over her ten-point check list one more time, just to make sure there wasn’t anything she had forgotten.

“What about your cash?” Alice asked. “Did you find a safe place for it?”

Lucy nodded. Then she lifted her blouse, and right there, between her pendulous, wrinkled breasts hung a white silk purse, dangling on a string she had fastened around her neck. “I think it’s quite safe there, don’t you agree?” she said.

Here is my last image of Lucy: She is sitting in the back of a cab, purse clutched tightly in her lap, her cane resting between her legs. As I bend down to kiss her goodbye, she looks up at me, victory written all over her face. “I told you I wasn’t quite ready yet,” she says. A quick wave, and the cab disappears around the corner.

I want to end my story right here, because I think it’s a good ending. But the story isn’t over yet. My friend made it to Arkansas (I will always wonder how she lived through that plane trip) and settled into her new home. She called me twice and mentioned that she was already looking for a small apartment. Not a word about the cancer, or how she was going to manage living on her own again.

Six weeks after she left, her niece called to tell me that Lucy had died during the night. They had gone out to dinner the previous evening, and when they returned home, Lucy said she was tired and wanted to lie down. A few hours later she was dead.

Maybe this is a good ending after all. Lucy could not outrun death, but in the end she faced it on her own terms. Unable to extend her life, she nonetheless managed to rewrite its final chapter.