Cherie
Legacy Name: Cherie

Cherie paints the dying. She works very hard to capture the dignity so often separated from death but she does not sugar coat reality. She will not paint over one single pain line or age spot that would give her paintings the beauty of a Raphael. The figure she creates takes on the pain and suffering of her subject, easing them into death, almost as if by magic.

Perhaps the claims of witchcraft hurled at her family almost four hundred years ago were not entirely without base, though she knows nothing of her family history. She cannot explain her gift but she will not deny it.

Her subject today is an old woman with multiple organ failure named Karen. Karen is beyond the point where conventional medicine can aid her body and she is afraid. She read about Cherie back in the days when men in white coats were wheeling her from one floor of the university hospital to another, running their endless tests and scratching their heads when they never got the results they were expecting. Karen was patient through it all, never failing to send birthday cards to her twenty-one grandchildren even when the treatments made her feel awful. She saw to it they would each receive some little present upon her death.

Karen read about Cherie in a magazine article, one of those dog-eared copies that looks like it's been sitting on the waiting room table for years though it is only two months old. Dying in a bed that looked out on the ocean sounded much better than being surrounded by white coats and stuffed full of nasty wires and tubes.

Cherie takes great care to paint the little braid with the purple ribbon that hangs down Karen's shoulder. Despite her pain, Karen insisted on telling the story of her youngest granddaughter as Cherie was setting up. Little Kaylee was a delight with honey blond pigtails and a real talent for the piano. One of Karen's greatest regrets was how much she would miss of the lives of her loved ones. Tears pooled in the wrinkles beneath her eyes as she listed those grandchildren who would not even graduate high school before her death. Grandma would be a distant memory to them, a lady whose face would be recognized only in old family albums.

Karen is quiet now, her eyes fluttering shut as Cherie adds the final stroke. She may continue to breathe for an hour yet but there will be no more pain. Death is imminent.

Doctor Harmon is there to pronounce the time of death. He is one of the rare few medical professionals that makes it a point to work with the final wishes of his patients, even when they are a little unusual. Why not make a person's last few hours the happiest they can experience?

He has worked with Cherie before. Sometimes he is even the one who mentions her name to a patient that is experiencing great anxiety over the approach of death. Cherie respects the man with the neatly trimmed mustache. He in turn respects her wish to be alone with the patient when she paints.

Cherie leaves the doctor's assistants to wrap the body and place it on a stretcher. Her part is finished now. The only thing left to do is to go in the back room and clean her brushes.

Guilt corners her at the basin sink, as it always does. No matter how often she tries to convince herself that she is doing good in the world, there are always doubts. There is a reason her client list has shrunk to only those who have been declared terminal by a doctor.

The painting of the boy with brown curls will haunt her for the remainder of her life. He'd lost his entire family in a fatal crash and was clinging to life by a thread. Had he really been beyond the point of saving? She didn't know. He'd certainly been in a terrible condition and there was no person cold hearted enough on the medical staff to deny he was in great pain.

Cherie had been so sure she was doing a service. Seeing his face smooth out had broken the hearts of the three nurses caring for him as he took his final breath.

Two weeks later she'd read an article about another child, a girl with the same types of injuries saved by a controversial new treatment. That girl was now in college, well on her way to becoming a neuroscientist.

What would the boy have become in life, if given the chance?

She had refused to sell it to distant relatives. She keeps it in a corner of the back room, covering that angelic young face with a length of canvas that she never removes. Her eyes flicker to the dark square and away as she scrubs every last speck of paint from the bristles of her brushes with a fingernail.

Sometimes she regrets her decision not to have children of her own but mostly she is grateful that very few will grieve her own passing. For one so accustomed to death, it is better that way.

Pureflower

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