The woman behind the glass asks Carroll why she has come to the ER. “I can’t breathe,” Carroll says. Simple enough. To the triage nurse, she jokes she is a frequent flyer. The staff take her blood, check her vitals, hook her up to a heart monitor, give her a bed, admit her. She wheezes. Her blood oxygen is so low she feels like she is floating. Sick for the holidays. For some reason that matters. She can’t cook. She can’t clean. She coughs.
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Carroll does two things wrong. She does not wear a mask, and she smokes eight cigarettes a day, a habit she will not break. She does not know why she won’t, but speculating only makes things more difficult. 
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In the hospital, she is awake for two days straight. It is the light, the every four-hour blood draws, the someone is always coming for something. Carroll has a premonition. She has two, or more, loses count. The premonition is that this could be her last Christmas, or that she might not make it that far. She isn’t sure whether to believe them. She can’t imagine not being able to make her cranberry sauce. Something moves out of the corner of her eye. A hallucination, she thinks. She goes crazy without enough sleep. She is so tired, so sick and tired, what she’s knows turns into dreams.
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She starts from scratch. God proved He was real all those years ago when she was young and psychotic, barreling down the Pennsylvania Turnpike. She’d sensed an intelligence larger than she could fathom. She reminds herself again, but usually she doesn’t remember Him. 
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But the premonitions, You are going to die soon, they stick with her, for now. Her immune system is filled with mutations because of the cancer. Three years earlier, her hematologist/oncologist said Carroll had up to ten years to live. Up to. She made her doctor repeat it. She didn’t hear it the first time for sure, or the second. She wrote it down, but looking back at the note she still thought she had written it down wrong.
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Her old friend calls, and Carroll brings up the premonition, but her old friend says she is just afraid of dying. But she isn’t, she thinks. After so much rehearsal, she just wants to do it right. Over the years, she has had so many delusions, all ending in her death. She would run around manic until she crashed. But she did not fall dead like the delusion dictated. She slept, and when she woke up, she pretended nothing had happened. This time is different. She can’t wake up and pretend. No, this time she is living the real deal, only without the delusion and mania to sidetrack her. And she has no idea how to feel. Her plan solidifies. When she gets home, she will forget the premonitions, like her faith, and smoke a cigarette.
 
Still, she wants to ask someone, one girlfriend in particular who seems wise, if believing in premonitions is okay. But her friend doesn’t pick up. Carroll knows she is too old to ask people what to believe. Dying and all, she decides she should think about it some more, there in the hospital, hooked up to oxygen.
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Sitting in the hospital, where every hour is 12 noon, she decides she wants to die well, finished, with her bucket list in order. No stray dangling connections half-baked cock eyed sitting in her coffin. She wants to get something for her boyfriend that will replace her, but she can’t think of what. She won’t die afraid because she has been through too much. Ending is easy. It’s the living with a mental illness that gets you. And God has given her plenty of time to put her affairs in order. 
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Old. Her fears all turned out unwarranted. She never had to sleep on a grate. And death, she sees how it is done now, the letting go, the breaking down. 
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Ironically, she realizes she doesn’t know how to die well because she has worked so hard for so long to hang on. Does she change? Stop making plans? Maybe her soul won’t go. She feels her nails have dug in and entrenched her. Besides, her life had just started to get livable again, hardly any voices who torture. Why did she think death is mercy, salve for the tired and afflicted who have tried hard to be something and failed? It’s really like no more chocolate. She doesn’t have to soak it in. That’s what death is for. She goes into the hospital bathroom, trailing the oxygen tube, and splashes water on her face while her lungs wheeze and crack and the ambulance drivers on the first floor bring new people in, people she doesn’t know, people who too are dying and living. She imagines the ambulance back into the ER, not for her, but for someone. They are so busy.

Published 11th April, 2026.

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Carroll Ann Susco has a chapbook, Bean Spiller, about her mental illness and over 50 publications, including The Sun Magazine, Painted Bride Quarterly and Asylum Magazine. See her LinkedIn profile for a list and links. She lives in Alexandria, VA.

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