Ready To Start Dying

January 29, 2011

This has been a tough week for all of us.  Not everything was bad.  When Charlene changed the sheets Monday morning, Mother’s hearing aid came flying out of somewhere, so Mom can hear with both ears again.

Jerry went to Walgreen's and bought some special glue to fix Mother’s dentures.  I cooked a pot of beans, one of her favorites and a dish not too difficult to chew, a good meal to test the repair job on.  Mom chewed up the beans and enjoyed them, but she made a face and when the beans were gone, pulled her dentures out.  They were cracked again.  The glue didn’t hold.

You know she can’t remember anything, so every single time I give her something to eat, she licks her tongue across her gums and tells me, “I don’t have these.  Where are these?”

 “Well, you took your dentures out while you were taking a nap, and I guess you knocked them off in the floor because Skipper got them and broke them.”

 Every time I tell her the story, I get an interesting response.  “Whaaaat?  The dog?  Well, for pity’s sake.”

Or she just gets mad at me.  She doesn’t remember why she’s mad.  She’s just sure it’s my fault.

“Well, what are we going to do about it?!”

We’ve come up with some interesting things she can eat.  One of her favorites is to dunk her cornbread or her donut or her graham crackers in milk.  I used the food processor to grind up the stew, and she seemed to like it just fine even though it made me sick to look at it.  The beans I mashed with a fork.  She has had no problem eating mandarin oranges and jello with fruit.  Tomato soup.  Chicken noodle soup.  Lots of juice and V-8.  Every single meal she reminds us, though, that her dentures are missing. 

A couple weeks ago, my older brother Wayne flew in from California and is staying with my son Slade.  He has been trying to make it to Oklahoma since Thanksgiving, but his daughter Cheyana got married a few days before Christmas in Reno, so he couldn’t come home until after the wedding.

Wayne has always been her child who wasn’t home, so his visits have always been special.  When she saw him sitting on the couch, she stopped her walker.  “Who is that?”  We eased her onto the leather couch beside him; she looked so tiny she almost looked lost. 

Even though she asked him who he was several times, within fifteen minutes or so, she seemed to know Wayne instinctively.

“Did you bring a woman with you?”

(Wayne has always been notorious for having new girlfriends.  He had five children by four different wives, and we’re not counting in-betweeners.  In fact, Mother actually paid for his vasectomy after the last baby.  Now, he’s 68 years old, but she obviously still has the same concern in the back of her mind.)

“Not this time,” he told her.

They had that conversation a few times, along with these a few times:

“Where have you been?”

“How have you been?”

“Have you been working?”
“Have you been eating OK?”

“I’m glad you came to see me.”

This was the second time he’d come to visit, but I don’t think she remembered that.  He’d gone to spend a week in Muskogee with old friends and had just gotten back again. 

Wayne was her war baby, the child she was left to nurse and rear alone the first two years while Daddy was fighting with the 45^th Division in Italy and France.   She and Wayne must surely have a special bond.

So having Wayne around this week has made her happy, but as some have suggested to me, now that he’s home, she may be ready to start dying.

On Tuesday and Wednesday, Mother threw up everything she ate.  She has shrunk to 112 pounds, but her belly sits in her lap bigger than a basketball and just as hard.  Sue, the hospice nurse, worries that the tumor may be pressing on her stomach.  Dr. McCoy sent a temporal nausea medicine to rub on her wrists, and that has helped.  She has been able to keep down her food for the last couple of days.

One day this week when she was upset about something, she tottered out of her chair and started the two steps toward Jerry and me on the couch.  We sat her down between us on the soft cushions.  I held her hand, and she calmed down.  She liked sitting between us so much that we’ve done that several times.  All of us try to touch her and hug her so she’ll know she’s loved.  Cord pets her head and runs his fingers through her hair.

Slade came by to see her a couple of different times during the week. If his wrecker gets a call and he is set free in our area, you can count on him to come by to see how his Grandma is doing.  She always recognizes him.  Of course, his booming voice is unmistakable.  She’s quit asking him if he has a job.  Surely she can smell his wrecker job on his greasy clothes and hands.  That’s who Slade is. She sat by him on the couch, too, to make it easier to see his face as he answered all her questions.

Wednesday night she woke me up in the middle of the night.  She was standing at the foot of my bed, calling for Greg, my little brother.  “I’m blind,” she told me when I jumped up to help her.  She had walked all the way to our room in the dark without her walker.

When I put her back in bed, she looked at me and asked, “Is Oscar sick?  Is someone dying?”  That’s only the second time she’s said Daddy’s name since the stroke.

“You’re the one who’s sick.  Oscar died a long time ago.”

“What?”  She looked surprised.

“How do you know that?”

“I remember things.  You can’t remember.  I have to remind you.  Oscar is waiting for you in heaven.”

She closed her eyes.

Thursday she smiled for Charlene and Sue and Wayne.  Otherwise, she has just looked miserable.

In the last two days, she has also gotten weaker and weaker.  When I’ve asked her if she’s ready to get out of bed, she says, “Why?”  She loves her morning coffee, but this morning, I couldn’t even bribe her out of bed with that.  She has been up only twice today to pee in her potty and then straight back to bed, and both times I’ve had to have Jerry’s help to lift her out and put her back in bed.

“Do you want to eat something?” I asked her for the third time today.  It was almost noon. 

“Why?”

“I thought you might be hungry.  The doctor wants you to drink some Ensure.”  She took a swig, making a face, but she drank it all dutifully, three times taking a slug to chase down her pills.  She didn’t like the chocolate pudding at all.  She started to spit it out but choked it on down. When I gave her a bite of applesauce, you would have thought by the look on her face I was making her eat curdled milk.  So I left her alone.  The Ensure would give her some nourishment, and I had gotten the pills down her.

Now, she sleeps.  She sleeps and sleeps and sleeps.  Maybe she has been waiting for Wayne before she could start dying.  Maybe.  Maybe she’ll wake up and be fine tomorrow, pushing Ivory the cat down the hallway on her walker.  Somehow, this time though, I don’t think so.