The Scythe of Death

Monday, August 4, 1997

Someone wrote, commenting on my entry from last Thursday, and I realized that I had kind of left things up in the air, describing how things were after my parents and I moved to Seattle, but not what happened after. Scott told me when I was first starting this journal to resist the temptation to provide all the background at once, but there is some more to tell about that time.

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After we moved to Seattle, we went to great lengths to stay out of contact with my alcoholic, druggy brother. He was evicted from his apartment in pretty short order and was homeless for a while till a friend took him in. (I'll omit the awful things that happened between the time that my parents were in Seattle with my sister, and the time that we got our old home packed up and I flew out.) He did have my sister's phone number and address, so he wrote sometimes.

My dad would watch TV all day. His lungs were chronically bad from smoking, so the walk from the elevator to our apartment was long for him, but he would go over to my sister's house, or our Virginia friends. But anywhere else just wasn't going to happen. In Virgina he had had a routine of driving to McDonalds for breakfast, then to the library, then around town; but he didn't seem to mind giving that up in Seattle.

If we had known the TV would be on all day, I think we would have gotten a three-bedroom apartment instead of a two-bedroom. One could have been a study, so Dad could have watched TV there! So instead my mother and I went out almost every day, for at least a few hours. We would go to the park across the street, Volunteer Park. We would go to the Broadway Market (a small urban mall near us). We would go anywhere I could think of that was accessible, because my mom was in a wheelchair shortly after we moved into our apartment. She didn't use it for getting around in the apartment, she could walk those short distances and transfer into and out of the car. But her lungs were getting bad from the cancer, so the wheelchair made many more things possible for her. She was glad to have it! She was really very healthy, except for the cancer!

After some months (and a lot of discussion between us sisters, cousins, brothers-in-law) we decided that it would be OK for my brother to speak to my mother on the phone. It was really tough for her, but I know it meant a lot to her. Her baby, her youngest! But we still didn't want him to come out and visit till he'd been straight for a while, and working. When he was drinking and angry he was a scary guy, and he had been threatening and awful with me when I was alone with him in Virginia.

This period lasted over a year. Caring for someone who is dying the slow way is tough, you are grieving so many losses, and the situation is constantly changing. You think you have a handle on things, then what worked before stops working and you need a new strategy.

My father's health seemed bad, but stable. Then one day he collapsed at the breakfast table, then came to a few seconds later. I took him to his doctor, who did some tests and took him to the hospital right across the street. Who was with my mother? I can't remember. The doctor said he needed a pacemaker. He seemed to come through the surgery, then developed an infection. We brought my mom to see him in the hospital. She was on oxygen by then, a small portable tank. I remember the doctor who was caring for my dad was very concerned about her. We let him know that the hospice was caring for her.

My dad was a little confused, thinking that his corner room in the coronary care unit was a corner office. But he seemed in good spirits. Then he got worse. Then he died. In just five days after he collapsed at breakfast.

We did bring my brother out for the funeral.

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I think it was shortly after this that we brought in a hospital bed for my mom. She was getting thinner and weaker; eating had always problematic since radiation treatments had given her a dry mouth years before. These days those Ensure ads show these healthy seniors (they look around forty!) drinking Ensure as if they were popping vitamins. If we could get her to drink three a day, that was a lot!

It finally got to be too much for her to get up and dressed. I was feeding her Ensure with a syringe, when she choked and aspirated it. She developed pneumonia and finally died, at home, with her children around her, just a few weeks after my father died.

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It was really my dad's death that was a shock. We had been preparing for my mom's death for a long time. I remember thinking about where Dad could live, would I still live with him, or could we find a group situation that would be good for him? Then, poof! he was gone, Mom was gone. But we had done so much grieving ahead of time, that we were already at the acceptance stage.

So ever since then, I am very pro on caregiver issues. I don't usually watch AIDS or cancer movies-of-the-week on TV. I don't need to.