2 posts tagged “death”

My mom reminded me today that it was, or would have been, my Aunt Susie's birthday.  I hadn't remembered, and, really, I never remembered her birthday when she was alive, either, I guess.

It was just a little over 4 years ago that I sat in a hospice room and watched her die.  I believe I was alone with her, though I could be wrong.  I'm not sure where everyone else would have been at that moment, just that I was alone with her.  But maybe it was just the gravity of what I was watching that rendered other people unnoticeable.

I never have thought that I was an easily shocked person, and yet.  And yet sitting in a room watching the last flutter of life leave a person you care about is shocking.  Yes, I believe shock is the right word for the numb, speechless feeling of watching a person slide into nonbeing and then just...stop. 

She died of lung cancer.  She might not have if our health care system weren't so screwed up, who knows?  But by the time they found it, it was basically over.  My mom went to be with her, to care for her in her last few months.  It was clear after a few weeks that my mom was overwhelmed, and I had just had a baby and my husband didn't have his green card yet, so he wasn't working either, so off we went.  We also thought the presence of the baby would add some fresh air to the situation, and we were not wrong, though I have been grateful every day since that he was too young to remember it. 

A person dying of cancer--really dying, I mean, with not even a hope of treatment, and probably not just of cancer but of anything--isn't really the person you know and love.  I remember one day towards the end, my aunt came out of her room in a wheelchair, naked from the waist down, screaming at my mom for some wrong--something, I don't know, that went back to their childhoods and hurts that apparently never entirely mended.  Of course, my aunt was near the end then, but still, it cut my mom deeply and left sucking wounds all around the room.  I remember my mom saying that the hospice people had mentioned that near the end, the dying often rally and find a sudden burst of strength; in the hospice literature, this was painted in a positive light, and my mom had believed that it would take the form of Susie maybe suddenly wanting to eat with us or sit up looking at old photo albums or something poignant or even cheerful like that.  Sure, who wouldn't want to believe that?  But it didn't happen like that. 

That was the day we sent her to stay in the hospice.  Until then, my mom had committed to taking care of her at home as per her wishes, no matter what it cost my mom personally.  But that day was too much.  Susie moved into the hospice.  My mom, I know, went home--to her own house, where her husband was, several hours away--for a much-needed respite from the needs of her dying sister.  My grandma, who had been around for most of this, too, even though there are almost certainly some things a mother should never have to watch happen to her daughter, I believe was out getting us something to eat.  I don't know where my husband and son were, but I was there in her room, probably waiting for my takeout dinner from Applebee's.  Her breathing was getting slower and slower with increasingly long periods of apnea between rusty little wheezes.  And then it just stopped.  There just was no more.  Whoever else may or may not have been there with me, I have never felt such a terrible sense of aloneness.

I did think, just as I thought when my dad died, that it would be good to be religious.  It would be good in times like those to believe that this person you loved would go off to some afterlife and maybe find some peace there that she or he had never found on earth.  But I'm not religious, and I don't believe this.  It was all end, no beginning.

But then in the end, I was back with my husband and son and nothing is ever so fresh and alive as babies and children are.  Circle of life, unbroken.

This is a bit of a pointless story, I think.  I'm not sure where it's going.  But I was down here looking at my old yearbooks from junior high and high school, and along with all the frightful hairdos and cryptic messages from my old friends, I came across some pictures that reminded me of this.

My mom was an EMT while I was in high school.  Now, we lived in a very small town (pop:  277) in southern New Mexico at the time.  There were 150 kids, roughly, in the junior high and high school combined and only about 14 kids in my class.  My stepdad also drove the ambulance, so between the two of them, they were always going out on calls.  When you live in such a small town, you know everybody that you're called to help.  Even when they didn't go on the call, we heard about the tragedies over the scanner before anyone else knew.  A lot of the people they got called to help were my friends, kids out doing something stupid, kids killing themselves. 

I found pictures tonight of my old friend Tim.  Tim was your basic headbanger type, except he was also a gifted athlete and a truly kind-hearted young man.  Sure, he tried to act all tough, with all his black clothes and the earring and the loud music, but inside, he was a big old lovey-dovey marshmallow, and he was a good friend.

One night, very late, my parents went out on a call.  Or maybe only my mom went--I'm not sure now.  When she got back, despite the hour, we had to talk.  She had been called out to the scene of a single-vehicle, probable drunk-driving (or, definite drunk-driving, but you can't say that until tests have been done) accident.  Tim had been the passenger in the vehicle.  He was not wearing a seat belt.  He went through the windshield and flew head first into the cliff by the side of the road.  Head first into a rock cliff.  They found him lying in the bushes below, conscious but in a lot of pain, of course.  When Tim recognized my mom, he said, "Oh, hello, Mrs. Newton."  As she and the other EMT were hauling him out of the bushes to the ambulance, I understand Tim cursed rather a lot, and then he would remember my mom was there and apologize for it.  Silly bugger.  She didn't care if he cursed.  Tim had a lot of broken bones and a concussion and god knows what else and was stuck in the hospital for quite a while.  I remember he said one of the nurses was cute, so the next time I went to see him, my friends and I took him a box of condoms.  The sad thing is I don't think he ever used them.  Oh, Tim--too sweet to sexually harass the nurses.

Another picture, this one of a Hungarian dude named Attila.  Cool name, right?  Well, Attila's family were very odd and had very odd living situations, and Attila himself was a very unusual and reticent guy, and so he wasn't very popular.  His dad owned the gas station and also had a gas delivery service, for people who lived too far out of town to come in just to get gas.  I always kind of liked Attila.  During English class, we would play paper, rock, scissors, and the penalty for losing was getting smacked on the wrist really hard.  One time our English teacher made us stand in opposite corners of the room when she caught us, but we were both laughing so hard that it distracted everyone even worse than if we were just smacking each other in the back of the class.

Anyway, so Attila.  Makes me so sad just thinking about it.  One day, Attila was driving a truck, with his younger brother as passenger, following their dad who was driving the gas truck to make a delivery.  I don't know exactly what happened, some kind of accident with the gas truck.  My mom went on the call.  She got to the scene to find their father decapitated, his head just sort of lying there in the middle of the dirt road, with both of the boys just staring at it, deep in shock.  When she told me, I was in shock.  I have no idea how you get over something like that.  I know Attila was never the same.  He turned quieter and gentler.  There was no more smacking, no more fooling around.  I missed him.  He was one person I wished there was something I could do to help. 

And then there's Bear.  That was his nickname, Bear.  He was a friend's younger brother.  It was during the fair, and we were supposed to be meeting him to watch the rodeo together, but he wasn't there.  Neither were his brothers.  When I got home, I heard the call on the scanner.  Twelve-year-old white male, at the Roberts residence, gunshot wound to the head.  He was dead before the ambulance even got there.  What makes a 12-year-old want to kill himself? 

It was really a relief when we moved to Montana, even though we moved the summer before my senior year.  We moved to a big(gish) city where I went to a big school and my mom stopped being an EMT, and even if she had been, we most likely wouldn't have known the patients.  Yeah, it was really a relief to get away from that.

Fucking yearbooks.  I'm putting them somewhere where I can't see them.