Tag Archives: skilled nursing

Guilt and Grief–Mates for Life

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The winters are warm now.  I felt a tickle across my hand this morning while I was reading on the sofa, one dog under my legs, another dog on top—a tick in late December.  How things have changed.  I put it, alive, in a sandwich bag.  I don’t know why.

I am home now—my adult home.  I’m in my house, and I’m even enjoying myself a little bit.  I like cooking and reading and taking short rides to the store in my new car that I park at the very end of any parking lot so I can avoid little scratches and scuffs for as long as possible.  Yesterday, after a good-morning hug, I looked my husband in the eye and asked, “You didn’t buy that car just because I was sad, did you?”  or something like that.   He said no, said we needed it, and we had the budgeted for it.  My oldest stepson has taken over the stewardship of the big SUV, the one we bought ten years ago for ski trips and road trips with little kids and large dogs.  Now he’s a big kid with his own traveling to do, and that is now his car.  And so the cycle of life continues.

I was in the doldrums, alone in my dad’s apartment, when my husband told me that my stepson had gotten the job, starting this winter break, and that I should distract myself with shopping for another car.  He let me pick it—the make, model, trim, everything.  I won’t say I went directly to the most loaded model available.  I’ll say that, in increments, my husband encouraged the journey.  I’m a car person, and he’s not.  I’m vain, and he’s not.  It didn’t take long to get me into a sport-touring model with black trim and leather seats and a heated steering wheel despite the warm winters ahead.  It has a paint-job that looks flat on a cloudy day, but in the sun, you can see a million little gold sparkles.  Yes, we had talked about getting another car.  We knew that one of the kids would eventually need a car.  But we could have paid cash for a used Civic with 100,000 miles on it and gotten that job done.  No, I suspect this car is also my distraction from grief.

I am fortunate to have such distractions.  I work at a college, so I am “fortunate” to have had the time to spend with my Dad over a winter break.  My husband has the ability to work from anywhere, so we were “privileged” to be able to spend two weeks with Dad who was fighting to stay alive while also fighting to die.  He picked a good time for it, I suppose.    

The subconscious will to survive, I believe, is quite strong.  Dad’s still fighting both battles.  I’m not there, but he still is, in that beige room with the fluorescent light that doesn’t work, and the roommate asking through the curtain divider if we have any snacks on us.  The roommate, apparently, ended up in the skilled nursing cycle of hell because his home care person tried to poison him.  So much drama.  I could write a book about that awful place. It would begin ten years ago, when my old friend’s sister was a floor nurse there.  She drank a bottle of vodka one evening, came to work, shot a patient dead and then shot herself.  She never should have gone into nursing, not with her temperament.  I feel too much, and Dad knew it, and that’s why he never discussed his DNR with me, or his suicide pact with his brother that never came to fruition.  I know why my friend’s sister did what she did.

I’ll get to take advantage of my swell schedule again real soon when I go back up there to help my brother clear out Dad’s apartment.  He told the landlord, an old family friend, yesterday that Dad would not be coming back, and he paid the rent forward two months.  That’s one of the things that really stings about imminent death—walking into someone’s home and seeing their stuff as they left it, knowing they will never return to use it.  I experienced that with Mom, and it hit me hard, looking at her shoes that she would never put on her feet again.  When it was Dad’s turn, I somewhat more prepared for the punch.  I walked into his place two weeks ago after my first visit with him in the hospital, had a little cry, and then dismissed the grief.  You can’t.  You just can’t embrace grief while your loved one is still fighting that primordial battle to stay alive, despite DNRs and suicide pacts. 

Dad’s still alive.  I’m not there.  This isn’t how I wanted things to go. 

The Industry of Dying

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It’s my second-to-last night in town.  I’ve been dreaming of getting out of Dodge.  Tomorrow, my husband returns.  We straighten out the Christmas gift situation (I had left most of the stuff I bought for people back at our house) and get it all wrapped to leave behind for the nieces and nephews and brothers and sisters-in-law who will be in town or coming through town before I’m back again.  I don’t know why the middle brother is planning to show up the last week in December.  He’s delusional if he thinks Dad will be alive by then.  Personally, I think he’s just comfortable letting our oldest brother handle the situation.  If Dad dies before December 27th or whenever he plans to show up, middle brother can be sad and nostalgic about it, but he won’t have to have witnessed the very last, ugly days.  He will have been spared the pain of watching his father slowly die, and in a most undignified manner, surrounded by burned-out strangers who won’t even bother to clean him or provide him with the most basic of services—cleaning the infected area around his catheter, wiping the gunk out of his red, swollen eyes, brushing the old food out of his mustache, checking his diaper.  If that brother-who-gets-off-easy thinks trips to Dad’s private room in the hospital three weeks ago were taxing, he’ll be able to sleep well having missed out on this travesty.

And I think I kinda hate him for that, even though I probably won’t be around to see Dad’s very last, ugly days myself—when you don’t live in town, you can’t always stay in town.  But I wanted to be with him when he took his last breath, like I had been with Mom.  Mom got to die at home with me and Dad and a few hospice nurses to help her along.  Her death took five days and nights of stress and grief and hell, but it was intimate.  Dad’s death will not be.  Two weeks ago, before Dad was shipped off to this penitentiary that we can’t bust him out to put him in the living room if we wanted to, I watched him sleeping, and I was reminded of Mom, and I thought, “You can go now. Why don’t you go now?”  Come to find out, death is not that easy. And come to find out, I am not that tough. I’ve spent two weeks here, sleeping in his apartment, looking at his things, and visiting him every day in a place that puts my stomach in knots to even think about going into. Yes, my husband is coming for me tomorrow, and I selfishly want to get out of Dodge. But what does that mean? Does that mean that tomorrow, or the next morning, when I look at Dad is his bed, and listen to him speak, no matter what he is saying, that will be the last time I see him and hear him alive? That gives me pause. I think there are going to be some very very difficult months ahead for my mental health. These aren’t easy decisions.

Middle brother didn’t get away entirely free.  Apparently, Dad laid into him, and only him, about the betrayal that he felt when he realized he was stuck there in that hospital.  Dad yelled at him, “You betrayed me.”  He literally said that.  Middle brother must have made him some big promises, bigger than our conservative older brother would be willing to make in good conscience.   Cuz he ain’t telling us we betrayed him, and we’re witnesses to the biggest indignities of his life.  Both brothers made Dad promises that I was unaware of—Dad was worried I wouldn’t have the guts to pull the plug.  I would have been the first if I’d been given that option over seeing his rapid decline in the past two weeks.  But Dad is now in “the system.”  Big brother has power of attorney and DNR that we all discussed last night, Middle B on speaker.  It says that he wants no IV hydration or tube-feeding should be in a place of no-return.  The big question was, IS he in place of no return?  His neurologist says that with proper nutrition, hydration, he could possibly get his mind back in a couple of months… and THEN what?  He’ll be cognizant of the nursing home that’s bleeding him dry?  No.  We three, unanimously, decided that if Dad doesn’t want to eat, and Dad doesn’t want artificial hydration, then we should honor that.  It’s the only power we have left.  We can’t make his care get better.  We tried that.  But we can make it end faster. 

In a better health-care situation—where problems, when identified, are addressed immediately, and where patients are surrounded by well-paid advocates who can make decisions for them that aren’t influenced by middle-men or bureaucratic roadblocks—in that situation we’d keep going.  In THIS situation, it’s better to die as soon as possible.