The Last Journey... So Difficult

My mother, Evelyn, with her book

Care for a person who is dying...

This is one of the most difficult experiences we can go through.  Physically, it requires lifting and turning our loved one's weight.  Emotionally, it is heart-breaking. 

Spiritually, accompanying a friend or family member on that last journey requires courage and faith that we may not be able to find.  It may come down to "acting as if" in order to act at all.

A friend of mine died last Friday just a few months from reaching her 89th birthday, the same age my mother and grandmother were when they died.  

My mother in this photo was 80 years old and doing book signings of her recently completed life story, Adventures of a Telluride Native.  Those were happy days.  

But she fell and broke her right hip at age 85.  Falls are so often the beginning of a downward trajectory.

In the case of my friend, she fell and was not discovered for ten or more hours.  There was hospitalization followed by rehab and skilled nursing, followed by hospitalization again and returning home with hospice care.

We watch as the person we love goes through episodes of frustration with inattentive hospital care, days of loneliness, periods of anger even at those closest to her, and many hours of pain.

It's one of the hardest parts of human life.

My mother was a registered nurse and taught nursing at the University of Maryland in Baltimore.

As her father was dying from dementia in 1976, he developed pneumonia and died about a week later.

"We always called pneumonia 'the angel of mercy,'" she said.  "So often it's pneumonia that releases someone from their suffering."

Yes, indeed.  My friend who died last week went through pneumonia a few weeks before she left this earth.  But of course, she received antibiotics to try to keep her alive.

It's so hard to know when care should be focused on regaining health--and when that kind of care should cease and desist.  We don't want to put our loved one through useless, difficult medical procedures.

The best discussion of these issues is Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End by Atul Gawande (New York: Henry Holt, 2014).

My mother with her father and brothers in better days.