cellini's Diaryland Diary

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Death, Hovering

And my grandmother is dying. She is in her mid-90's and she is fully ready to go.

It isn't any one thing. Brittle bones, a series of infections, frail skin, dramatic weight loss. Sudden dementia and hallucinations.

REALLY dramatic weight loss. I doubt she weighs even 85 pounds now. She looked skeletal today. The hollow at her collar bone was so deep that I literally couldn't see the bottom.

She rallied today, so I took Harry to the nursing home with me to see her for what will probably prove to be the last time. Her mind is all there, though she mixed up words now and then. Her eyes were cloudy and she was very tired. She has made it very clear that she wants no further life-extending care. No IV, no X-rays, nothing. She has some medications that she takes, but that's it.

My mother is in denial today. She was making too much of one good day. This is just what happens when people die of a long illness or of old age. A long slow decline, sleeping more, hallucinations, infections, weight loss. And often there is a good day or a few good hours right around the end, where the patient seems to have a burst of energy and is mentally all there and wants to sit up and talk to people.

That's what this was. She was coming around enough to say good bye.

I'm not going to be very sad when she goes. I hope that doesn't sound callous. But really, I know that she wants to go and she is ready. She's said so for a long time. She has lived for a very long time. Born during the first World War. She met civil war veterans when she was young. She knew Joe Kennedy Jr. when she worked at Harvard before the war. She lived next door to Chang Kai Chek's wife. Dying of old age with your family all around you and your great-grandson visiting is a pretty good way to go. She gets to go when she's good and ready at the end of a long and fruitful life. That is nothing to be sad about.

This isn't like when my grandfather (other side of the family) died last summer. That happened too soon. He had a really full life right up until the end and he was only in his 70's. Lots of friends and hobbies and never a moment of being less than 100% mentally there. It was essentially complications from a life of smoking and lung damage that caused his death. He had left standing instructions on when to have the plug pulled, since he didn't want to be on a ventilator indefinitely with no plan or path to him getting off of it.

That was just too soon. I think that absent that health crisis, if he hadn't smoked for something like 50 years, he would have had another 10 really full years left, where he could have traveled and done whatever he wanted. Then maybe another 10 years or more of what could still have been a good life with reduced activity.

I expect that my grandmother will be dead within a week. And the funeral will be a nice big event, but then I wonder what happens after that with the extended family. Whether all of these people who live scattered across the eastern US will ever find ourselves in one room at the same time again. Since her brother died a few years ago she is the last of her generation. Her children are very different from one another, my uncle in particular. He is a nuclear engineer 10 years senior to my mother. Bitter, very conservative, highly intelligent, prone towards greed, racism and a general lack of compassion. While there is no standing feud or bad blood, I'm not sure that he and my mother will bother to see each other after their mother is dead. And of course their respective children will likely tend to follow along.

There is no old home place and no home town. None of the family on my mother's side still lives in the town where they grew up. Just a bunch of people scattered around with their only common anchor about to nod off into the absolute. A solar system with a sun about to blink out.

And what am I in this constellation? I like to think that I do my part. I have never had any real quarrel or feud with any other family member and have pointedly stayed out of other people's. I try to be reliable. I was the first of my generation to marry, the first to produce a child. I visit and keep in touch with family. I'm the one any of them would call to fix something or get a squirrel out of the attic or deal with a roadside emergency in the middle of the night.

On my father's side, I am the eldest son of the eldest son of the eldest son of the eldest son. Perhaps even farther back then that. I am painfully aware of the fact that this places special responsibilities in my lap.

2:04 a.m. - 2011-03-29

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