The Ritual

Morphine. It is a delicious drug. I have prescribed it many times. My patients like it, those who have to take it. The choice to take morphine is preferable to the alternative. They tell me it does not stop the pain; rather, it separates the pain from the body. The pain is still there, they say, but it assumes an existence of its own. It becomes a separate entity, distinct from the body it afflicts. The mind knows that the pain is still there, but for the moment, it has become disengaged. For a few moments, at least, a person can cope. I have gotten very few complaints.

I pushed my mother in the wheelchair up the ramp from the clinic parking lot. Normally my father would have done this, but I have come home and it has become my responsibility. He walks quietly behind us. Up to now I have made arrangements for her surgeries, for her visits to the consultants, for her chemotherapy and her x-rays. Now there is nothing more for me to do. I have evolved from a caregiver to her caretaker.

There were at least a dozen pill bottles in the plastic bag on her lap. At some other time I would have dumped the contents of the bag onto the table and arranged the scattered bottles. This time I did not. I carefully removed one bottle at a time from the bag and reverently placed each one on the oncologist's desk. I arranged them in a single file, neatly and evenly spaced, just as I had staggered them on the dresser in her bedroom

I had never been in Dr. Gorman's office before. He was middle-aged and suspiciously gaunt like most of the patients in his waiting room. The innate grayness of his manner …