Monday, July 26, 2004
Good evening, gentle readers. Surprised to see me?
Because my last post was the announcement of my mother's passing, that is where I must take up the thread of AF&PP. I do not find this an easy task; perhaps I've even stayed away from here so long not just out of laziness, but because I don't have the faintest idea how to eulogize her, any more than the minister who presided over her funeral did. I'll get to that.
The first thing that I think of is that I wasn't there to see it happen. Or I was, and yet I wasn't, because I was sound asleep in the room I currently use for that purpose (I can't call it 'my bedroom' because it isn't, in more ways than one).
But this isn't about me, it's about Mom.
She got on famously when she first came home, eating better than she had in weeks, sleeping more comfortably, being generally more lucid. That lasted all of two days. After that she wouldn't eat anything at all, and to my knowledge seldom even got out of bed. Monday morning, June 8, I went to work and she was still there. By the time I got home that night, she had slipped into a stupor my sister Phyllis could barely rouse her from. She was that way first thing next morning, too; Tuesday evening Phyllis called hospice in. I had gone to sleep about 10PM, but woke up for a few minutes around 11; Phyl and the hospice nurses were in with Mom, but I went back to bed, and back to sleep. Looking back on it now, I don't know why I did that. Perhaps at the time I rationalized that I'd just be in the way of the hospice nurses doing their jobs. The idea that I didn't have the balls to stand by Mom's bedside at her death--to face it--is not a pleasant one.
When I got up next morning, Phyl told me Mom had died.
This is turning out to be more of a very heavy chain than a thread.
Because my last post was the announcement of my mother's passing, that is where I must take up the thread of AF&PP. I do not find this an easy task; perhaps I've even stayed away from here so long not just out of laziness, but because I don't have the faintest idea how to eulogize her, any more than the minister who presided over her funeral did. I'll get to that.
The first thing that I think of is that I wasn't there to see it happen. Or I was, and yet I wasn't, because I was sound asleep in the room I currently use for that purpose (I can't call it 'my bedroom' because it isn't, in more ways than one).
But this isn't about me, it's about Mom.
She got on famously when she first came home, eating better than she had in weeks, sleeping more comfortably, being generally more lucid. That lasted all of two days. After that she wouldn't eat anything at all, and to my knowledge seldom even got out of bed. Monday morning, June 8, I went to work and she was still there. By the time I got home that night, she had slipped into a stupor my sister Phyllis could barely rouse her from. She was that way first thing next morning, too; Tuesday evening Phyllis called hospice in. I had gone to sleep about 10PM, but woke up for a few minutes around 11; Phyl and the hospice nurses were in with Mom, but I went back to bed, and back to sleep. Looking back on it now, I don't know why I did that. Perhaps at the time I rationalized that I'd just be in the way of the hospice nurses doing their jobs. The idea that I didn't have the balls to stand by Mom's bedside at her death--to face it--is not a pleasant one.
When I got up next morning, Phyl told me Mom had died.
This is turning out to be more of a very heavy chain than a thread.
