post mortem on the post mortem
May. 20th, 2009 11:50 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
flamingswordor, Things That Kept Me Sane By The Deathbed:
1. You. You guys cannot even know. Thank you for all that you are to me, and all that you do.
2. Music. My Chemical Romance's Cancer and Another Train by The Poozies.
3. Hospitals with wifi.
"The sitting still is making me tense, and the smell is making me want to run away and scream. Carnations and illness. Every five minutes or so I get up and take the sponge-on-a-stick out of the cup of ice water and dab it inside her mouth until she reflexively bites down on it to wet her mouth. She can't swallow, or wake up, so it's like taking care of a very sick infant. We have to rely on noises and tiny movements to judge what she needs as best we can. She's the helpless one, but we feel powerless, too. Frustration and edginess abound.
I've never spent an extended amount of time with someone who was dying. I feel really weird, and I can't quite put it into words. I don't want her to be dying, but I know she is. So I want her to die faster and not be in pain or embarrassed that people are coming in to see her like this, which she never wanted. And that feels a little traitorous and self-contradictory. Mercy killing is something that I could do, and it would be easier than sitting here waiting. Maybe that's kind of screwed up, that I'm more comfortable with the thought of killing someone I love than I am with the reality of boredom, worry, resignation, and self-restraint. It feels fucking icky."
Being able to talk about it and get your support while it was going on made everything so much less horrific. Being able to get that out right then, and have a record of it, and not forget it or gloss over it later will help the next time something like this happens. And it will. I'm less emotionally close to my dad than to Rhoda, but someday my mom will die. And I'm going to need to know how to deal with that responsibly, because she'd want me to, and because I'm one of the three remaining children of this generation of my family, and neither of the other two know my mother at all. So I had better be prepared.
And I am. I'm okay now, and I know most of what I'll have to do to be an executor of someone's estate, and where to find help for that. I'm dealing with the ambivalent aftereffects of her death, but there's no survivors guilt, and my past issues are apparently well and truly dealt with. So as much as I bitch about personal growth, I guess I'm also glad for it.
Rhoda is off to another kind of existence, everybody got to come see her and say their goodbyes, it was as relatively trouble-free as could be managed within the subset of any event concerning my family. Only two people lost their shit in the actual hospital room, and it turns out that the half of the family who were there for her decline were the ones least capable of dealing with it. The half who got in the next day were better prepared and things quieted down. Other than the smell, it was almost pleasant, being there for the dual momentous/unremarkable end of her existence. I got to sing "The Rose" for her with some friends of the family and give reiki to a dying woman, which feels different. I got to take care of her in a way that she didn't let people do much of. And now I get to hear more stories about her. We owe honesty to the dead, it's a tradition. It's nice.
I need to try to remember a story for her wake that isn't really dirty or shocking to the cousins, but . . . it's Rhoda. She's where I got my gutter-minded sense of humor, and my tendency to be as loud as I feel like. She's basically my dad. And it does feel weird to have lost her, but in a way I've been losing her since last fall when I realized that none of the plans she was taking about included the possibility of getting better. I was so angry that she had given up, but maybe she just knew it was going to beat her and stopped fighting it. There's no way to be sure, and I forgive her anyway. It's not like I'm good at staying angry with people, not when I understand them. That's something I got from her, actually.
How appropriate. :'D
1. You. You guys cannot even know. Thank you for all that you are to me, and all that you do.
2. Music. My Chemical Romance's Cancer and Another Train by The Poozies.
3. Hospitals with wifi.
"The sitting still is making me tense, and the smell is making me want to run away and scream. Carnations and illness. Every five minutes or so I get up and take the sponge-on-a-stick out of the cup of ice water and dab it inside her mouth until she reflexively bites down on it to wet her mouth. She can't swallow, or wake up, so it's like taking care of a very sick infant. We have to rely on noises and tiny movements to judge what she needs as best we can. She's the helpless one, but we feel powerless, too. Frustration and edginess abound.
I've never spent an extended amount of time with someone who was dying. I feel really weird, and I can't quite put it into words. I don't want her to be dying, but I know she is. So I want her to die faster and not be in pain or embarrassed that people are coming in to see her like this, which she never wanted. And that feels a little traitorous and self-contradictory. Mercy killing is something that I could do, and it would be easier than sitting here waiting. Maybe that's kind of screwed up, that I'm more comfortable with the thought of killing someone I love than I am with the reality of boredom, worry, resignation, and self-restraint. It feels fucking icky."
Being able to talk about it and get your support while it was going on made everything so much less horrific. Being able to get that out right then, and have a record of it, and not forget it or gloss over it later will help the next time something like this happens. And it will. I'm less emotionally close to my dad than to Rhoda, but someday my mom will die. And I'm going to need to know how to deal with that responsibly, because she'd want me to, and because I'm one of the three remaining children of this generation of my family, and neither of the other two know my mother at all. So I had better be prepared.
And I am. I'm okay now, and I know most of what I'll have to do to be an executor of someone's estate, and where to find help for that. I'm dealing with the ambivalent aftereffects of her death, but there's no survivors guilt, and my past issues are apparently well and truly dealt with. So as much as I bitch about personal growth, I guess I'm also glad for it.
Rhoda is off to another kind of existence, everybody got to come see her and say their goodbyes, it was as relatively trouble-free as could be managed within the subset of any event concerning my family. Only two people lost their shit in the actual hospital room, and it turns out that the half of the family who were there for her decline were the ones least capable of dealing with it. The half who got in the next day were better prepared and things quieted down. Other than the smell, it was almost pleasant, being there for the dual momentous/unremarkable end of her existence. I got to sing "The Rose" for her with some friends of the family and give reiki to a dying woman, which feels different. I got to take care of her in a way that she didn't let people do much of. And now I get to hear more stories about her. We owe honesty to the dead, it's a tradition. It's nice.
I need to try to remember a story for her wake that isn't really dirty or shocking to the cousins, but . . . it's Rhoda. She's where I got my gutter-minded sense of humor, and my tendency to be as loud as I feel like. She's basically my dad. And it does feel weird to have lost her, but in a way I've been losing her since last fall when I realized that none of the plans she was taking about included the possibility of getting better. I was so angry that she had given up, but maybe she just knew it was going to beat her and stopped fighting it. There's no way to be sure, and I forgive her anyway. It's not like I'm good at staying angry with people, not when I understand them. That's something I got from her, actually.
How appropriate. :'D
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no subject
Date: 2009-05-22 02:21 am (UTC)