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My parents died with three teeth between them.  It wasn’t their fault. Genes or heredity or something.  Cousins Melvin and Paula lived the last six weeks of their lives drinking all of their meals, their teeth completely gone.  Just before he died, Grandpa Willis’s teeth turned brown and fell out of his mouth like breadcrumbs.  Same with Grandpa George on my mother’s side.

Uncle Randolph, not yet sixty, has been losing about one tooth per month for the last two years.  He keeps the brown pebbles in a squat glass vase on his nightstand.  I’ve seen Uncle Randolph spit a tooth into his palm like a watermelon seed, admire its wet shiny surface and shriveled size, and tip his hand over the lip of the vase.

At seven, my brother Gage began losing his teeth.  He was younger than Kari and me.  We knew baby teeth fell out in order to make room for adult choppers, but with Gage, his teeth came out brown and shrunken, and adult teeth never sprouted.  Gage died in the bedroom upstairs with Kari and me holding his hand.

I still miss Gage, but in a way, I don’t know him anymore.  I was eleven when we buried him at Grace Hill.  Now, I’m 31 and Kari is almost 29, and when it gets quiet and lonely, Gage comes to mind. Only he is still seven years old and what do I know about consoling a dying child?

Neither Kari nor I have kids.  Kari says she couldn’t do to a child what has been done to her or Gage.  I agree.  Who in this family wants to have a baby whose future is a toothless death?

Gage and Kari had been close, and Kari had cried for many days after Gage was gone.  Then the tears stopped, and Kari became defiant and angry.  She obsessed about her teeth, about keeping them clean and healthy and white and rooted to her gums.  Above all, she was determined to keep her teeth.

Years later, Kari found a dentist and made his acquaintance.  Dr. Ronny had come from a huge city and worked in emergency rooms where he’d seen abscessed teeth, bleeding and festering, teeth hollowed by cavities, blackened by disease.  Dr. Ronny gave Kari fluoride treatments, cleaned her teeth every month.  Meanwhile, Kari brushed each tooth compulsively, her medicine cabinet stocked with water picks, teeth-whitening strips, rolls of floss, bottles of mouthwash, boxes of toothpicks.  She used manual and electric and battery-powered toothbrushes, toothbrushes with rotating and oscillating heads that cost $140 each.

Kari visited Dr. Ronny so often that they fell in love, married within six months, and moved in to this house with me, and when Kari saw a speck of brown on her lower left cuspid, Dr. Ronny immediately performed a thorough teeth-whitening procedure.  “I don’t want to die,” Kari said.  “I refuse.”  She repeated this often like a song she couldn’t shake. So Dr. Ronny blasted Kari’s teeth white, and she came home smiling, pausing at mirrors to pose and grin and show me what was possible. “We don’t have to live the past,” she said.

But later, the fleck of brown returned, and Kari stopped smiling, had all of the mirrors in the house covered with construction paper and masking tape and stored in the garage.  When her first tooth fell out (the pesky cuspid), Kari told me it wasn’t fair, that no matter what you did, life had its own stubborn agenda and the cruelty of living was thinking you could change things you didn’t like.  “Why were we born at all?” she asked me.  “Why did Mom and Dad make us when they knew what would happen?”

I couldn’t answer Kari’s questions, didn’t even make an attempt.  Instead I sat with her, holding her left hand as the right reached into her mouth to tug and twist a dangling incisor.  She cried.

But Dr. Ronny became defiant and angry himself and wouldn’t quit.  He contacted endodontists, periodontists, and oral surgeons, called in favors far and wide, spent hours researching cures for oral maladies.  He inquired about experimental drug therapies and, since Kari refused to leave the house now, he brought experts to her.  But nothing helped.  Her teeth, one by one, turned brown, loosened like ripe fruit on the vine, and fell out.  Like Uncle Randolph, Kari collected her dead teeth in a glass on her nightstand.  As the glass filled, Kari wept, lamenting the death of each tooth.  She hardly spoke anymore, grunting and gesturing only when she really wanted something.  Most often, Kari wanted to be left alone. Dr. Ronny offered her false teeth, but Kari refused them.

On the very last day in May, the phone rang.  Uncle Randolph had died in his sleep–peacefully, the aide assured me–a single brown molar jutting out of gray gums.  As a result of the liquid diet, he weighed 127 pounds.  I told Dr. Ronny about Uncle Randolph and he replied, “What is it with your family?”

The news of Uncle Randolph wouldn’t help Kari, so I kept quiet.  Kari had worsened to the point where she was crying all the time, mumbling incomprehensible words, and drinking meals through a straw.  But Dr. Ronny told her about Uncle Randolph, and Kari insisted on going to the funeral.  A few friends and coworkers gathered at Grace Hill, Kari and I the only kin.  As Kari cried, her lips sucked into her mouth with each sorrowful convulsion.  She hardly acknowledged the coffin even as I stepped forward to pitch a handful of dirt onto its lid. She gazed elsewhere–into a stand of hemlock, at the cloud-smeared sky, at her own hands.

Kari grew worse over the following weeks.  She lied about taking her pills and claimed never to be hungry for a meal replacement drink.  And she stopped crying even when her teeth uprooted and fell out.

I spent time reading the newspaper to her or a book if I could find one whose characters didn’t die prematurely, unjustly.  I brought Kari the mail and helped her tear through the envelopes. I wanted to be near her, as with a prolonged embrace.

Dr. Ronny entered Gage’s old bedroom and placed divorce papers beside the glass on the nightstand.  He said to Kari, “What kind of dentist has a wife with her teeth in a cup?” I waited for Kari to gum her way through a tirade, to smash her glassful of dead teeth against the wall, but she kept quiet, and Dr. Ronny soon moved to Florida.  He could not save Kari’s teeth, and she could not save her marriage.

I brought Kari a meal replacement drink and left it on the nightstand, the straw bent over the lip of the tall glass. While holding her hand, I told Kari a story about an earlier time, when we rode bikes to the orchard and pulled apples from the trees and crunched them in our teeth, the juice wetting our lips. Kari’s head ached.  She pointed to the door, mumbled, “Leave.”  I kissed her cheek, said, “I love you,” and sat downstairs, the house dark and still.

Kari died the next morning, her drink untouched, four obstinate teeth remaining.

I ignored my own pain for as long as I could but found myself at the bathroom mirror, steam rising from the faucet, my lower lip pinched between two fingers. Brown decay coated each tooth.  My gums felt spongy, soft, like the dirt at Grace Hill.  One after the other, my teeth died, and as they fell out, I collected them in the empty tomato sauce jar on my nightstand.

I always have headaches and can hardly sleep in this empty house. No one reads to me or brings me the mail.  No one serves me meal replacement drinks; no one holds my hand and reminds me of what life used to be before my teeth started falling out.

Two molars and two incisors remain though they are brown and ready to die. I have paper and pen here, but no one to write to. I write anyway, about my parents, about Kari and Gage and the others, about trying to understand this thing about to happen.

The page is full, but I don’t remember what I wrote.  I am glad there are no children to see me this way, to wonder why I created them when I knew their teeth, like their lives, would brown and loosen and die.  And yet if there were children, they would kiss my cheek and say they love me and read to me and maybe this would be easier.

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Brian DiNuzzo is a writer, photographer, and teacher, originally from New Jersey.  His publications include: Thin Air Magazine and Echo Ink Review.