Collab of Flash Fiction, Poem and Artwork by David B. Axelrod

DON’T PROMISE A FRIEND


	Don’t promise to sit with a friend until he dies. He tells me he isn’t going to play that stinking cancer game. No poison, no chopping off pieces, no colostomy bags and besides, once it hits your esophagus and your brain they can’t exactly cut it all out. For his part, he refuses to take test after test, so they can’t write down a definitive diagnosis. The doctor just takes me aside and says, “Look, you’re his health proxy. By now we know 99.9% for sure it’s cancer so let him do it his way.”
	We contact home hospice and they start us off all smiles and reassurances about death with dignity, and enough “comfort care” that he doesn’t need to worry about the pain. I like that euphemism. Comfort care is so much cuter than hard drugs. 
	VSED stands for Voluntarily Stopping Eating and Drinking. Did you know it’s your constitutional right to do that—particularly if you are terminal, but because my friend refuses to get a final diagnosis, his medical charts don’t say he has cancer in several places.
	When the actual hospice nurse—not the administrator who signed him up—comes to evaluate him, she says, “You know, we won’t assist in suicide. The diagnosis is indefinite so you’re talking about suicide.”
	“No,” my friend says, “I’ve always been happy with my life. Now, I know what I need to do, and I’m not afraid of dying.” He tells me to take her out on his terrace and show her.
	I bring her out on this balcony where you can see the ocean and an inland waterway. 	
	“Wow,” she says, “What a view.”
	“Look down,” I tell her, encouraging her toward the concrete railing. “Sixteen stories,” 	I tell her. “It only takes three seconds to fall. Five stories is enough to kill you. And you think my friend is suicidal? He could jump anytime.”
	She leaves saying she’s going to discuss Baker Acting my buddy—having him committed because she thinks he is a danger to himself. She thinks he doesn’t want to get better. 	Now I don’t know if I’m going to sit by his bedside until he dies or visit him in the bin while they pump him with antidepressants, as if that would cure him. As if he wouldn’t be glad to live longer if that were possible. 
	But they do send a caregiver to his house—a sincere, ten-buck-an-hour woman who holds my friends arm to help him get up to piss however many times a day. 
	To assuage the intake nurse who thinks he’s suicidal, he consents to taking Lexapro, though he tells me it does about as much good as if he shoved it up his ass. I tell  him it is available as a suppository but I won’t be the one to insert it. And I stay for five, six or more hours with him every day. 
	We have an agreement that I’ll tell him such bad jokes that by the time he’s really weak, he’ll wish he were dead. We go a couple weeks like that before he realizes he doesn’t want to linger. It’s time to take it to the next step. He stops eating, and for good measure, he barely drinks anything.
	It’s also time to make “The Arrangements,” But the woman who comes to his place to plan the cremation doesn’t like our sense of humor. She lists the fancy ways she they can reduce him to ashes and he declines them all. 
	“We have a Cremation Casket with a white crepe interior, no bed of course. Our price is just $899.” She seems sure we will recognize a good deal.  
	“A sandalwood coffin would smell great,” I say.
	“You could all sit in the lotus position as I burn,” my friend says, “and chant Om.” 
	The cremation specialist doesn’t get it.  She lists a couple other options and my friend goes with a cardboard box. 
	“I’m okay with lying on some wax paper,” he says. She declines to say whether that is an option or even legal.
	“Do you want the brass urn for your ashes?” She persists, but did she really need to ask?
	He goes with a much smaller cardboard box to hold him, and she insists that he specify who will claim his ashes—that being me, the loyal friend.
	She prints out the agreement on this neat portable printer and I say, “Hey, you left out the most important option.”
	“What?” she asks, hopeful she can still pump up her commission. 
	“Marshmallows and chocolate.”
	She misses it completely. 
	“S’mores,” my friend tells her, “For when he’s there while you burn me.”
	He signs. She leaves. I’m staying now for something like eight hours a day and worry that I shouldn’t leave him with the people that hospice sends because: 
	A. They don’t have a sense of humor either. 
	B. They waltz in and say, “Can I get you a sandwich,” when he’s already been five days without eating and they truly don’t understand this VSED, and,
	 C. Men don’t like to use a bedpan, or maybe it’s just conditioning, so he thinks he has to stand up to piss, so if the aide leaves the room, he tries to get up to piss and he falls. 	He’s fallen twice already and has the cuts and bruises to prove it. 
	“Maybe you can sleep here,” he suggests, but he doesn’t have a second bed.
	“I love you dearly,” I tell him, “but you’re sure as shit too ugly for me to sleep with you.”
	Of course they are screwing with his meds. They don’t want him to have narcotics because he might become addicted. Hello? A dying man here? I don’t think addiction is a going to be a problem.
	How long do you think someone can go without eating? It’s been a week. He’s not quite Auschwitz but it’s getting grotesque. He really hasn’t been able to swallow much for months, eating so much egg salad he might as well have feathers. 
	It turns out you can go weeks and weeks without eating much of anything. He decides to go completely without drinking. Dehydration can certainly kill you pretty quickly, except don’t promise to sit with a friend until he dies. Or at least consider that having cancer doesn’t mean he has a weak heart. His mind might be thinking he’s ready to die but his heart has a will of its own. 
	“Takes a licking and keeps on ticking,” only you may not be as old as my friend and I who remember John Cameron Swazy—the first person to broadcast the news on television. “Ladies and gentleman, a good evening to you. Sit back, light up a Camel and be an eyewitness to the happenings that made history in the last twenty-four hours.” For all his puffing as he brought us the news, after his news-casting days, John Cameron Swazy had a long career peddling Timex watches and lived to be 89. My friend is 75. He’s out of time but the damn ticker just won’t quit.
	Twelve days without food and the last five days without a drop to drink, he’s still alive, though his urine has gone from blood red to thick coffee. 
	Did you know even when you don’t drink, your body still puts out urine? And did you know that even when a man is debilitated and delirious he still wants to stand up to piss? I have to climb into his bed and restrain him so he doesn’t try to lift himself to the edge of the bed where he’s so weak he will fall. 
	It’s all so hard to watch, I’m forgetting to joke. “Did you hear about the fellow who got hit by a car? Someone rushes over and covers him with a sweater. Another fellow rolls up a jacket and puts it under his head and asks, ‘are you comfortable?’ The man on the ground looks up and says, ‘I make a living.’” 
	I can make the rest of the story go more quickly even though it takes fully seventeen days, the last eight of which are completely without food and liquids. He develops a fever—probably a urinary tract infection. He hits 104. They want to cool him off and give him antibiotics. They still think it’s their job to keep him alive.
	They informed me a couple days before that they might completely stop sending health aides because he doesn’t have a terminal diagnosis on his chart and, “Just dying isn’t covered by Medicaid. We might not get reimbursed if we send someone to sit with him just because he’s close to death.” It’s all I can do to get someone to come for the last nights.
	I tell him he’s done a great job evoking sympathy, not to mention that some people are just dying to be skinny and he’s come up with a sure-fire weight-loss plan. 
	“You’ve done what you needed. Just let go.” I say, and I want to believe there is a faint sigh of acknowledgement. “Die,” I tell him. “It’s getting too melodramatic.”
	I worry that I am beginning to mean it, but I can’t blame him for his last breaths. I’m the fool who promised to sit with my friend until he dies. I could have just encouraged him over the balcony. Instead, I grip his hand firmly as he passes and the hospice caregiver ;eaves the room to let me cry.

ASTROPHEL AND I

 Some families only meet up at marriages
and funerals where astrophel provides
a bridal bouquet or wreath. You’d think 
I could content myself with greetings 
when you flower into the room, 
a blossom in the heat of summer,
delicate in your cotton sheathe, smiling
like while light as I present as the dark night.
“He’s after a lay,” people say, “But she’s 
too good for him.” Right twice over, 
I can validate. Lust is not romantic
nor is it her mind I mean to conquer, 
but sonnets, like neoclassical poetry, 
are for poetry affectionados and pop culture
is more "slam bam, barely a thank you 
ma'am. Time was a prom date required
a corsage. Now a Seven-Eleven rose passes
for sentimental. Granted, a grocery-store 
bunch of flowers with baby’s breath 
will do when you arrive to a family
reunion. Your cousin’s new baby, 
reeking of baby powder, bubbling 
 a map of breast milk is the prevailing
symbol of new love. A poem about 
how Astrophel loved Stella may have
been the poet Petrarch's trip, catalogued in
Cliff Notes and crib sheets. Once, all our
book shelves had the same texts we kept after
our degree to prove we were well read. 
Frat men who notched their bed posts 
for de-flowers, now emasculated by 
blood-pressure meds or prostrate 
operations, commiserating at wakes or
grandchild’s wedding, or avoiding 
the question who will go next.

About the Author:
Dr. David B. Axelrod was Suffolk, Long Island’s, and is now Volusia County, Florida, Poet Laureate (2015-continuing). He has been published in fifteen languages and hundreds of magazines and anthologies, and twenty-four books of poetry, most recently The Official Rules for Olympic Bed Riding (Bold Venture Press, 2023).  He is also author of Merlin Stone Remembered, chronicling the work of the women’s-rights advocate author of When God Was a Woman.  Dr. Axelrod is recipient of three Fulbright Awards including his being the first official Fulbright Poet-in-Residence in the People’s Republic of China. He is publisher of Writers Ink Press. He lives in Daytona Beach where he is the founder/director of Creative Happiness Institute, Inc., a not-for-profit organization presenting programs in creative writing and alternative wellness (www.creativehappiness.org). His complete CV is available at www.poetrydoctor.org/CV.