Let's Pretend!

My mother's best friend happens to live next door to us. Just a coincidence. We happened to run into each other yesterday and she waved me over for a progress report.

"How is Ruth?"

I gave her a brief update. We had a fluid-in-the-lungs scare where the doctors were just starting to hint about how far did we mean to go with this care thing and then Mom rallied and life rolls on as usual.

I started to practice saying "stop the antibiotics, just give her comfort care" and found that it was much easier to say in a theoretical sense than actually saying "all right, let's go ahead and kill her."

Then I lecture myself sternly that, of course, I'm not doing it, she wanted no extreme measures taken and made it crystal clear, I didn't give her this hellish nightmare of an Alzheimer's twilight that I fantasize will end one day with Daddy, the angels and Jesus appearing to lift her spirit out of her ailing body and take it to, you know, Up There.

And that is what I want more than anything for myself, and I have signed the appropriate legal papers. But if necessary, my loved ones can print off this blog for extra assurance. I want to follow along with my brain, wherever it may go in the future.

"I....I.....I'm sorry that I haven't been to visit her much," she began when I cut her off in mid sentence.

"Neither have I."

It's been a family joke for years that whenever a loved one dies, somehow, Lorrie always manages to be somewhere else.

Coconut.She was killed on my 21st birthday when she ran into a motorcycle which cut off half of her face. I was living with two kids for a week while their parents went on holiday.

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Daddy

He died instantly on August 1, 1997 of a massive heart attack. I was at Myrtle Beach on holiday. My mom and sister raced to the hospital when he was pronounced. "Do you want to see him?" my mother asked. "NO! I shouted! No way! Cremate away!" Never have I regretted this decision.

Nicky

I made Roger take him for his final journey to the vet's office. I knew that Nicky was just as comfortable with him as with me. But then there was

Cassie

Cassie had been rescued from an abusive home and only felt truly comfortable with me. So I womanned up and took her for her final date at the vet's office. It wasn't as hard as I expected.

But there there was my aunt.

Eugenia

This is a picture Daddy shot in the forties. She lived to be 92 and died in 2004.

She died on a Thursday and I had a night class, and I intended to visit her the following morning.....

So. I told her the truth.

"I just hate to go visit her. It's so much easier to pretend that she's happily living in assisted care across town, enjoying her new friends...."

She nodded understandingly.

I want to run away from 2009.