Dead Funny

Mom and I were talking about death while sitting around the concrete picnic table. She asked me about hospice volunteering. She shared her experience as a nurse and the daughter who sat with the father and the mother and the mother-in-law as they lay dying. Both my Grandmothers died at our house under her care.

We talked about Oregon's Physician Assisted suicide laws and the truth on the ground about end-of-life care. She bemoaned the continuing lack of adequate knowledge and sensitivity about pain management, the many times nurses and doctors acted as if the perseverance through discomfort was a virtue, the reliance on opiates a moral failing.

We have been without a law such as Oregon's, whom some 400 or so souls have availed, and yet many Doctors and families have responsibly aided in making death a passage rather than a violently resisted secret and shameful termination. This is the same medical tradition that treats pregnancy and birth as a disease, so why would death be treated any different?

But many have always know how to ease the transition. It happens all the time. Does it hasten death by a day or two? Perhaps. If you prescribe enough morphine to alleviate pain, and that pain is exponential, you will eventually suppress breathing to a nil point.

So we were talking, back and forth, and agreeing. Dad joined us. She brought up Pa, my grandfather, and his failed suicide and eventual death some 4 days later. How angry he was that he had failed. Then we talked about his father, my great-grandfather, and his two attempts. The second took. First he tried carbon monoxide, the tailpipe trick. But the car stalled out before he had completed his crossing over. Revived, he was angry. Furious. Pa said to him "Don't get mad at ME, I'm not the one who didn't put enough gas in the car."

We cracked up, laughing at how that story reveals my grandfather's "bedside manner" and compassion. Or lack thereof. Laughing, Dad said: "Making a note for myself: get a full tank." More laughter, with him following up with "but, no, I would never, have never thought of that."

Will he ever? It's a different blood line, and his disease often robs the will and any real self by the time it would be a "seemly" or "timely" to take such an action.

But Mom has already started scheming. Yesterday, as I drove the RV and Dad was standing outside in our path directing us, it was: "if you just keep rolling..." A pause. Then we laughed.