Death

An Update on My Writing and Life in General


I crossed the 25,000 word threshold. It is the half-way mark for NaNoWriMo but not my ultimate goal now. I am still convinced I have 79,000 words in me, and so the memoir will take me into December which means revising some of my writing plans for the end of the year. Not the worst thing which could happen to me.

I have been prolific over at 50 Something Moms. Check out this, this and this. Sadly, however, Moms Speak Up is being held hostage by a server that is refusing to renew our domain name.  Subsequently, the site is in blogosphere limbo. I am a bit choked about this because I stupidly didn’t make back ups of my work there and fear it is now basically lost forever.

No new publishing opportunities to report but I am hopeful. It’s been about six months since I revised my sci-fi short and sent it back for the requested second look at On Spec. Perhaps the length of time is a good sign? I choose to think so.

I am past ready for my child to go back to school. She has asks daily when she will be able to back to school. Monday is still a long way off.

My mom is okay. That is simply how it is as a widow or anyone grieving a loss really. Things are okay or fine until they are not. My aunt came to stay this past week and all things financial are now in order. Auntie is a wunderkind of organization.

CB has been a bit “fussy”, but I talked with him Wednesday evening and he sounded better than he had in a while.

DNOS and Nephew2 caught the same flu we had. Nephew2 is mended but my sister has a horrible cough. I worry about her. She’s had the cough in some version or another since last spring. We went to Walmart to get Halloween costumes and rode in Dad’s old car. I drove that same car in June to take Dad to the garage downtown and didn’t really notice any smoke odor. But DNOS has been using the car on and off all summer and my eyes started watering as soon as I got inside. It was like sitting in an ashtray. Even opening the windows didn’t help. I worry about her health.

On a sad note, Shelley’s biological father has kidney cancer that has spread to the ribs and hip. He had lost one kidney years ago because of a tumor, so this cancer ridden one was it for him. As I understand it, he was not a good father. A morose alcoholic, his relationship with his children and grandchildren was distant at best.

Rob took the girls to see him Wednesday night. They were ambivalent. Rob was rocked a bit by walking the same halls he’d traveled during Shelley’s treatments.

Death continues to dog us, but I am reminded of a conversation I had with BabyD when I mentioned that Daddy would be going into town to visit with Shelley’s dad.

“God must need him, Mom.”

“And why do you think that?”

“Well, if you are old or too sick to fix that means God needs you.”

Simple universal truths. When do we get too old to remember these things?

November is National Hospice Month


My parents had to be coerced into accepting hospice care during the last months of Dad’s illness. My father especially was not receptive and only agreed to try hospice for Mom’s sake.

“We’ll give it a week,” he told his nurse, Ann, who had to enter into intensive negoations with him to be allowed to come for more than a weekly check of his vitals.

In the end, both my parents were pleased with the level of care and compassion. Charming rascal that he was, Dad had the nurses and aides wrapped around his little finger and even tried to convert the organizations minister, Rev. Melissa, to Catholicism during his short time in their care.

Like most families, my parents waited far too long to call in hospice. They believed, falsely, that palliative care is for the bitter end – the last days or hours – and not something that is meant to ease the transition for patient and families and can be sought up to six months or more of a projected end.

Hospice is not about death. It is about living well in the end times.

My first husband was in hospice the last three months of his life. Many people can spend up to the last year or more in hospice care, depending on their illness. Hospice is about symptom management but it is also about spiritual and emotional care. I can’t say enough good things about the people who dedicate their time and talent to hospice or about how important an organization this is, especially in the current mind-set that exhorts people to live as long as they can without quality.

Getting into the Spirit of Dying


I spent a bit of the morning Friday placating DNOS and our mother. It seems that the first official visit from the hospice nurse was not a rousing success. Mainly because Dad refuses to die peacefully and without being irritating.

Oh, did that sound cold? Here’s something colder yet then, as I listened to first my sister and then my mom describe the nurse’s visit and the ensuing argument it caused between my folks, so much so that when the nurse left DNOS lectured them on decorum, I realized for the first time really just how incredibly annoying and oblivious to the world I had been myself back in the care-giving and early widowhood days.

At one point as I reassured Mom for the tenth time in as many minutes that she was indeed relevant and important, I wondered if I had sounded that shrill and peevish and if people were rolling their eyes at me as I poured out my frustration over the phone to them.

Well okay, not eye rolling, but certainly more than one person had to have wondered if I would ever be a sane member of society again.

From this distance I can see all sides to the slow disintegration that is taking place. Mom is feeling overlooked as caregivers often do. She has needs as real as Dad’s and she thinks no one cares. Dad is feeling pushed to the grave, which is absolutely not what is happening, but I can see where his resistance is coming from. A couple of weeks ago he was dying someday and now he is dying sometime really soon. It is an adjustment and he feels the loss of autonomy more keenly than he has since he was banned from driving last spring. This is his passing and he is going to give the orders. He isn’t thinking about Mom too much right now and she is hurt by this. DNOS then is in the uncomfortable position of mediating their struggles.

My parents have never been stellar communicators. Fifty-two years has brought them great insight into each other but no great wisdom as to what to do with the information beyond tormenting each other. My sister would rather be peeled like a grape than involve herself in confrontation. Her modus operandi is too simply tell the parental units what they will be doing.

“And you are going to back me up,” she ordered as we spoke, “don’t you tell either one of them anything different.”

Four times I assured her that I was in total agreement. I don’t think she  heard me anymore than Mom did when I spoke with her later.

God, I must have been just the most awful person to run into back in the day old days. If I was even a tenth as deaf or petulant, I can imagine that my number was constantly being screened on phones everywhere.

And I know this is all just a phase. Eventually a person comes back.

Dad is probably the most even keeled of the three. He is driving DNOS crazy with his impromptu dictations of funeral arrangements. So far he has had her write out a list of personal items to be given to certain people, informed her that he would not have individuals eulogizing him at his service nor did he want any sort of digital picture display. DNOS has had to take down the pallbearer list, not the funeral home that Dad prefers above all others and be told that picking out the casket was her job.

Last evening she got to take the two of them to the wake of my Uncle Erv’s wife who passed away last weekend. I don’t like my uncle at all. He was a sharp tongued guy with no inner censor who looked me up and down when I was about fourteen and told me,

“I can’t believe how fat you are.”

Still, I felt badly for him when Mom mentioned how incredibly lost he was when she and my Dear Auntie visited him the day after his wife died. She had taken care of all the details in their life. He couldn’t even find their checkbook. They were married for sixty some years.

When I mentioned that I was surprised that she was driving them to the wake, I got,

“Well who else is going to do it?” rather peevishly.

I had actually suggested to Mom that they skip the wake and just go on Saturday with Dear Auntie, but wakes are huge social events. There was no way that either of my parents would miss an opportunity to mingle.

The only good news that came out of the phone at me today was that Dad was stable. The fluid is building but slowly, so there is no need for me to fly down right now. I can’t say that this disappoints me at all, but DNOS is clearly desperate for me to come, judging from her tone, though Mom knows perfectly well that my arrival is not going to let her off the hook as far as caregiving. I won’t do that again for her.*

Rage against the dying of the light, isn’t it? We have that done, I think.

*About six weeks after Will died, Dad had some surgery. He had a growth in his rectum and they thought it might be cancer – it wasn’t – but I was required to come as it was my spring break. Never-mind that I had a thesis due on the 1st of May and comps to write. There were complications and Dad ended up in ICU (ironically right next door to his brother’s dying wife – fun times) and I was the one doing hospital duty while Mom worked and DNOS went about her life. It was unfair of them to stick that on me. It will not happen again.