Something I wrote back in August, originally as an email to a friend that I never sent. It’s more personal than other entries here and many of my readers already know about the context – I hope it’s not too hard for you to read it. I put it on this blog because the second part says something important about end-of-life experiences in medicine, and the two parts together are about me consciously and subconsciously trying to make some sense of the changing of the generations: the feeling of no longer being the third living generation of my family, but now the second, and of how time can change the roles of caregiver and cared-for…
I had a dream last night that I have to believe was inspired by your talk at the panel about caring for people at the end of their lives… I dreamt I was with my paternal grandmother, who died several years ago after a long period of being ill and not really herself. We were talking as if it was before her illness, but I think I somehow knew – as one does in dreams – that she was dying, or that she had already died. I can’t remember exactly what was said, but they were loving things, and it felt good to be close to her. She was upset for a while about a trip she regretted we had not taken together, but otherwise was at peace. And she wasn’t just lying in a bed with me at her side: I was holding her. I felt very clearly the warm, loose skin on her arms, and the softness of her curled white hair. It was unlike any moments we had shared in life except for the reversed situation when she would hold me on her lap to comfort me when I was little. She would rock us back and forth shushing gently, and saying, “there there, bubbe.”
My grandfather, her devoted husband, passed away a few weeks ago. He was in fact alone at the moment of his death, but only after all of his close family had been able to gather around him and say goodbye. Of all the ways that it could have happened, I think his death was a blessing. My plane reached Seattle in time for me to join the others at the hospital. We all sat with him as he breathed quietly, sedated and comfortable, until the end of his beloved Mariners baseball game on TV. Then we each had our moment to say the things that we hoped he knew already. We came back in smaller groups to sit with him in the day or two after that that he held on, but each day his body somehow seemed to contain less and less of him. I had the profound sense that he stopped looking like himself – once his eyes had closed and his smile had been smoothed away. And then he was gone. His death was expected, peaceful, quick, and surrounded by love.
