We had a frost last night which finally killed off most of my geraniums and that got me thinking about what comes next.
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I’m not quite at 168…
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But my book corner should last me through mid January.
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I wholeheartedly agree Thomas.
❤️
A friend called the other day and said her ex had just entered into hospice care. She asked if I had any more of the small booklets I was given when my mother passed over a decade ago. Written by a hospice nurse they took the mystery out of the physicality of dying and truly helped at a difficult time in my life.
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I had one more set and was happy to share them with her daughter. Nothing about losing a loved one is easy, but knowing what to expect at the end brought me a small measure of comfort.
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Sunset… lighting up the fall foliage across the road.
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Sure was pretty.
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Even with those awful greenhouses blotting the landscape.
This post may be a little woo woo for some of my readers and that’s fine. I’m a very grounded skeptic at heart and I swear if these things didn’t happen to me I wouldn’t believe them either.
If you’re a long time reader you’ll remember I wrote about the bizarre things that transpired during my mother’s last days in hospice. I can’t explain any of them, but I was there. They happened.
I’m an only child and my father died when I was young. My mother and I were close. She was a very spiritual woman and believed in a lot of things I don’t. Her death in 2014 hit me hard and deciding what to do with her ashes took me a few months. After burying half of them with a memorial tree on our property, I decided to take the other half back to the Jersey shore where we spent countless happy hours as a family.
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She adored the ocean.
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It was an emotional journey returning to the place she loved and saying goodbye.
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But I felt her with me and knew she’d approve.
I was a bit of a wreck that day, drained and raw. So when we returned to our hotel all I wanted to do was crawl in bed for a nap… but then I saw this on the counter.
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A white bobby pin that wasn’t there when we left. The same type of white bobby pin my mother used every day. The ones I had to special order at a beauty supply shop because no one carried them. The ones my mother would obsess over if she didn’t have enough.
I don’t use white bobby pins.
I certainly didn’t bring one with me to New Jersey.
No, the maid hadn’t cleaned our room while we were gone and left one. I checked.
Scoff all you like, but I know it was my mother’s way of telling me she was okay with my decision.
For the last 9 years that bobby pin has been a talisman and has lived on the bureau in my bedroom where I carefully dust around it. Until the other day… when I had just finished reading a book about a girl who lost her mother and believed she could communicate with her from beyond the grave.
I finished the book, went into our bedroom and it was gone. I looked everywhere. Under and behind the bureau, in all the drawers, behind my jewelry box and perfume tray. My husband didn’t take it. No one else was in the house. Lord Dudley doesn’t jump on the bureau but on the off chance he had, I scoured the room, searched in every corner and under the bed. I even emptied the vacuum cleaner. Nothing.
Just… gone. There that morning, gone in the afternoon, and I can’t explain it.
I also can’t explain this –
Remember when I posted about the recent storm and our loss of electricity? When my husband and I had an epic six hour gin rummy match by flashlight?
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We used a blue deck of cards I had in the drawer. Naturally I won because gin rummy was my mother’s game and she taught me well. Hope springs eternal for my husband, but he rarely beats me.
Wanting revenge, he pulled out the deck last night and we played again. I was skunking him and after I’d just dropped another gin… double points thanks to a spade… he complained about not drawing the jack he needed and picked up the deck to check how far down it was.
The deck we had just recently played with for 6 hours.
The deck that has been in the kitchen drawer, untouched, ever since.
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There wasn’t a single jack to be found. None. It was a deck of 48 cards.
Did Lord Dudley remove them all? Doubtful.
Is there a jack burglar on the loose in rural Maine? Equally as doubtful.
I’ve been joking lately about our house being cursed due to all the renovation nightmare mishaps, but damn. Now I’m really beginning to wonder.
This is the last picture taken of my husband and his sister.
She had asked him to bring her one of his Marine Corps hats so she could wear it in honor of his service. He happily obliged.
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My sister in law passed a few weeks ago and it’s just now I can bring myself to blog about it. For those of you who read regularly, you know it was a blessing… and sadly what she wanted.
But that doesn’t mean it was easy.
We received the call from her daughter Monday at noon and rushed over to the nursing home to be with her. Though you know it’s inevitable, losing your mother is hard… and slowly watching her die? Just about unbearable.
It was a bedside death watch with everything that implies. Five family members and a close friend, sitting… and waiting. Watching her painfully gasp for breath, float in and out of consciousness and be given enough morphine to drop a horse. You could tell even the nurses were surprised how long she hung on.
Tears? I cried rivers and couldn’t stop. But not just for her…. it was watching her daughter trying to let go that really broke my heart. When it finally happened, 11 hours later, her daughter simply crumpled to the floor. Broken, exhausted, and physically spent.
We did everything we could to help then… emotionally and financially. Which is why the next day found us at the funeral home making arrangements for cremation.
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Death is big business, never forget that. I’ve learned painful … not to mention expensive… lessons about what is necessary and what is superfluous charging for things you don’t know you don’t need.
We chose the same place that cared for my mother, my husband’s mother and his brother. A small, honest, family run business… which are getting harder to find these days. We made the arrangements, we paid, we picked up her remains and brought them to her daughter a week later.
A small celebration of life is being planned at her daughter’s house for Labor Day weekend and we’ll try to help with that as well.
My SIL’s struggle is over.
Her daughter’s struggle… trying to understand why her mother could never find joy in life… is ongoing.
We were told my husband’s cousin would call us. We thought it would be to lift the ridiculous no family visitors ban he’d implemented at Uncle Donny’s bedside .. but we were wrong.
When he finally did call and leave a message?
It was to tell us his father had passed.
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Uncle Donny.
When we lived in North Carolina he would visit once or twice a year. Our cat Bubba instantly adopted him.
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He was a Vietnam vet with over 20 years in the Air Force. An honest and decent man.
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Seen here with his sister, my husband’s mother.
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If you needed money to pay your rent? Uncle Donny.
If you needed someone to help you move? Uncle Donny.
If your child needed school clothes, a car, college tuition? Uncle Donny.
He was a lovable goofball with a big generous heart.
Though I hold him personally responsible for my spouse’s addiction to yard saling and filling our cellar with crap, I also have fond memories of trolling flea markets with him and enjoying his childlike glee when he would find a “treasure”.
We visited my husband’s uncle in the hospice last week. He was in good spirits…. laughing and joking with the nurses.
When we visited yesterday? We were met by a nurse who said we weren’t allowed in his room and then ushered into the chapel.
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We were told to wait here for someone to come talk to us.
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We waited and a woman we hardly knew, someone my husband’s uncle called ‘niece’ but wasn’t actually related, came in to inform us the uncle had taken a turn for the worse a few days before and was totally unresponsive. The end being near, his son was flying in that day from Florida and left instructions no visitors were to be allowed.
Needless to say we were beyond shocked.
Barred from seeing him. Barred from saying goodbye.
It was all I could do to stop my husband from storming the beachhead.
Since the son is legally next of kin and has power of attorney, the facility listens to him. There was nothing we could do.
Since we’ve been emotionally overwhelmed and beyond busy with my SIL’s situation over the past month… other things have taken a back seat. And though I hate to admit it, that included visits to my husband’s elderly uncle. We’d been going once a week to visit, bring groceries and run errands but hadn’t done anything other than call in three. And then the other day, we found that his phone had been disconnected.
A visit to his house found it locked up tight, blinds drawn and truck missing.
A few frantic phone calls later….
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We arrived at the V.A. hospice facility.
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A huge campus with a pond and strolling flocks of Canada Geese. And unlike a lot of Veterans Affairs hospitals, a complex with an excellent reputation and amazing care.
It was here that we found my husband’s soon to be 91 year old uncle.
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A recent trip to the emergency room revealed he is riddled with bone cancer and has a mass on his lung.
He won’t be going home.
But honestly? He’s alright.. and has made his peace. He was in good spirits, joking, telling old stories and flirting with the hot and cold running nurses who are catering to his every whim.
This place is amazing.
Private rooms with a fridge, microwave and Bose sound system.
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A large menu. Room service food whenever you want it. An ice cream and dessert cart that goes door to door like the Good Humor truck.
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The high tech bed has Wi-Fi and a USB port.
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With multi colored light reflections on the floor.
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They even hooked up a DVD player and brought him John Wayne movies.
The staff is kind, compassionate and go out of their way to make him as comfortable as possible.
Losing a loved one is never easy, but he’s in a wonderful place and being well looked after. He’s a widower with one son who lives in Florida… so we’re going to do our best to visit as often as we can.
Since I dumped a rare personal feelings blog about my SIL on you recently, I thought it only proper to offer an update.
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Unbelievably and against all odds, she’s still at the hospice. Relatively alert, and though weak as a new born kitten, starting to regain her appetite.
I can’t stress how remarkable this is. She was literally on her way out. We saw it, the doctors were waiting for it and yet here we are two weeks later and they say she doesn’t require further hospice care and will be moved to a nursing home soon.
I’d say this is good news but sadly it’s not. She wants to die. She keeps telling everyone we should have let her go. She has completely lost the will to live and takes no joy in anything.
We visit 2-3 times a week and tell her we love her. We bring her favorite foods and try to lighten her mood. I send her a photo of better and happier days every morning. We’ve had long, deep, emotionally draining talks, but I’m at my wits end how to help.
Maybe I can’t.
Maybe I should just stop trying.
I hate to say it, but she’s so sad and miserable maybe it would have been better if she had just slipped away.
I don’t usually blog about deeply personal things, but the past week has been tough and my heart is too heavy for the usual fluff today.
It started with the death of one of my husband’s coworkers. An unexpected heart attack. He was 52.
The next day we learned an old childhood friend of my husband’s had passed from the cancer he’d been battling for years. Not unexpected, but still sad. He was 71.
We’ve also been helping to care for my husband’s elderly uncle who still lives alone at 91. His mind is strong, but his body is failing and he’s unable to do everyday things. We do his grocery shopping, run his errands and clean his house… and while I know he appreciates the help, he also gets very cranky with the invasion of his personal space. He really needs nursing home care now and though it’s not unexpected… it’s been sad seeing the slow decline of health of a once vibrant man.
But the situation that’s broken me is my SIL. A big hearted, funny, generous to a fault, deeply troubled woman who’s suffered from depression all her life. An unhappy childhood, an abusive marriage, a bitter divorce and a diagnosis of MS in her late 40’s led to a deep slide into alcoholism and opioid addiction. After trying to kill herself in 2010, we took her in and she lived with us for a year. We got her off the booze, the drugs and the cigarettes. We put over 30lbs on her frail frame, got her substance abuse counseling and psychiatric help and shared what she always tells people was the best year of her life. We gave her love and a fresh start and felt good about setting her up in a nice little apartment. But left to her own devices, the last 12 years have been a slow road to self destruction. Isolating herself from friends and family and smoking two packs a day led to COPD and emphysema and a total dependence on oxygen. Somewhere along the line she gave up on life and though we tried to help numerous times, you can’t save someone from themselves. Now… at barely 80 pounds, she’s dying in a hospice facility. We visited her yesterday and the literal husk of the woman we saw there broke both our hearts.
Warning – I’m going off the rails of my usual blog fluff here. It’s been that kind of day.
Not sure why I feel I need to post this, perhaps the anniversary of my mother’s death is bothering me more than I realized, but here goes.
I read a series of novels written by Rob Hart recently…
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It was a good romp, but in almost every book there was a section dealing with this topic:
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They say you write what you know, and this author nailed it.
If you’ve never seen a dead body…. and I mean right after death, not processed by a funeral home…. I’m glad. I wish I hadn’t, because what he says is true.
My mother passed in a hospice. She was only there for five days and it was blessedly quick as deaths by cancer go. I was at her side every day, all day and into the night. It was horribly sad and utterly exhausting. I did it alone for the first four days but on the fifth, my husband insisted on coming. To be honest I didn’t want him there. He doesn’t wait well or patiently, and when you’re sitting bedside vigil that’s really all there is to do. My mother was heavily medicated and thankfully free of pain, but she was also mostly unconscious. He tried, but only made it until 5:00pm and then convinced me to leave for the night. She died an hour later. I’ll never forgive myself for not being there, but that’s not the point of this depressing post.
The point is that the author was correct. When I returned to say goodbye and gather my mother’s things a mere hour after she passed, the difference was startling. I don’t know what I was expecting, hers was the only recently deceased body I’d ever seen… but it was indeed just that. A body. Sunken in on itself and completely empty. Everything that was mother had vanished. In a perverse way, it made the final goodbye easier. She was well and truly gone, spiritually and physically.
It’s definitely not like the movies, neither serene nor beautiful.
River's world..... 