Shoes, Ships, and Sealing Wax

Deathwatch

Not a rat this time, although we have two who are not doing well. Not the dog.

I've mentioned my aunt a few times. She was diagnosed with lung cancer a bit more than two years ago, back during the cicada summer. I remember this because of the haiku

In the cicada's cry
No sign can foretell
How soon it must die.

I wrote about it then.

I spent the evening with my aunt. She's dying, and every sign fortells it. In fact, the hospice people left a booklet about the stages of dying, and her...symptoms, I suppose...are a bang-on match of what's listed under "One to Two Weeks Before Death" in the book.

What the booklet doesn't tell you is what you are supposed to do when you're sitting next to the bed of someone in the One to Two Weeks Before Death stage.

I wanted to tell her much I enjoyed it, when I was a little kid, when I spent the night at her apartment. How much fun it was to eat at the People's lunch counter and how I appreciate all the puzzles she taught me to do from the Dell puzzle magazines. How I will always revere Charles Schultz because of how much she loved Snoopy. How cool it was to ride around in her Chevelle.

A single woman driving a muscle car...I never realized 'til just now that she may have been my role model.

I didn't tell her any of this, because in the One to Two Weeks Before Death, the dying person is (according to the booklet) is letting go of her surroundings, moving inward to prepare to leave.

That, and my aunt didn't seem up for conversation. She mostly said "Oh, gosh," and a few sighed "Lord have mercy"s. That, and she tugged at the oxygen line, and pulled at the blanket, and writhed like she was in pain, although she'd had a few morphine shots.

The restlessness was in the booklet, too. It's metabolic, apparently. I can only hope she doesn't feel as uncomfortable as she seems.

Some people might find this massively disrespectful, to compare the death of a family member to the death of a rat...but I saw some real parallels between how I've seen the rats die, physically what they do, and how my aunt was tonight.

The little hospice book kept stressing that the dying process was natural, a shutting down, a gradual transition, and I suppose that makes sense. I couldn't help but think, though, that nature seems to have some kinder ways to speed up the process, like heart attacks or being struck by lightening.

Which isn't to say that I want my aunt to die quickly. I don't want my aunt to die at all. But she is dying. I wish I could know what she thinks of the process.

One of her few statements tonight, an unsolicited comment, was "I bet you never expected this."

She is right that I didn't, but I wonder if she was talking to me or herself.

Posted by Nic at July 22, 2006 10:50 PM | TrackBack