Random Ramblings, Year's End, All That

 I was alone in the house last night. JG and the daughters were away coping with the aftermath of his brother’s death. It doesn’t happen very often, that I am alone. That I choose my own meal time and bedtime without having to consider anyone else’s schedule. That I can write undisturbed by the ordinary routines of the day. That I am on my own.

What did I do with my unscheduled time? Well, wrote this, for one. I spent most of the day alternately doing laundry and writing the post below this one, a eulogy for the brother who has gone. I wrote it pretty carefully and when I put it up, I only found two errors, one being a wrong date of John’s death. His friend was on the phone about two minutes after I posted, to correct that one, but I had already seen it. Typo. The other was a bad insert erasure. I did a lot of rereading and rewriting before I posted. I wanted it to be good, to be a fair picture of a complicated and somewhat conflicted man. Don’t know if I got it. You never really know how something that personal and subjective will read to someone else.

But most of my writing is subjective. There is not much else going on here, not even in normal times and these are not, for sure, normal times. We did manage to have a Christmas Day with the nucleus of the family, but it was not the gathering we had hoped to have, due to one positive Covid test and one relative who decided, reasonably I thought, not to fly this season. There were gifts and music and a table laden with goodies (and four vegetable dishes, just because). I still have a kitchen full of cookie tins that are full of cookies because the YD baked from the time she arrived until Christmas Eve, non stop. Well, almost nonstop. She took a few naps and walks. It was a fine thing to be together. This is the YD’s first home visit in two years. But she was too late to see her uncle. And that hurt.

I am glad that, from my last visit, my last memory of John is of laughing with him over the completely predictable and totally in character actions of his brother and our ED. We had arranged to have John’s bathroom remodelled to put in a walk-in shower. The work was finished the day before we arrived, and JG, that evening, was talking about getting a shower seat for it. With arms, he thought. The ED demurred. The shower had a good bar that John could use to stand up, she thought. JG said there was no bar there. The ED said yes, there was. The two red-headed opponents rose, in sync, and proceeded to the bathroom to settle the argument. And John and I looked at each other, did an in sync eyeroll and laughed like loons. It was just a perfectly typical thing for them to do. I am glad I can remember him laughing.

It sometimes seems to me that particular bits of memory in turbulent times, get locked into the brain. My last memory of my mother is a sad one – she was in pain and confused. An aunt I cared for deeply, I recall, in her last day of life, sitting in her wheelchair, head at a strange angle, cushioned by morphine. At least she was serene - earlier she had been frightened by reflections in the hospital room window, thinking that they were going to attack her. The end of life, in my experience of helping my parents and aunts through it, is a rough ride sometimes. Not always. My father, I am convinced, died in his sleep, having dozed off while watching his beloved baseball on the television. He was 85 and while he had some pretty major ailments, he was able to his last day to live independently, drive and enjoy a lot of things. I hope that is what is in store for me, but it is not something that can be planned.

The only plan we can legally make is an application for MAID, ahead of debility. Fairly severely restricted eligibility for it, too. John would not have qualified by the time he needed it, as the applicant must be fully competent to agree at the time it is administered. I think this needs to be changed to allow a precondition on the part of the applicant, but I can see that it will be tricky to structure it in a way that protects both the medical people being asked to do it and anyone who is worried that they will be, as it can be said,’ put down’ without their concurrence. 

No one, if they think about it reasonably, wants to die in confusion and diapers and fear, cared for by relative strangers in an institution. But that is how most of us will die because that is how our relationships and medical systems are set up. We live most of our lives in small nuclear families that cannot handle the end- of-life care most of us will need. Our medical system can eliminate or cure a lot of things that used to kill old people. And so, we end our lives in repaired bodies but with minds that no longer function well. And that usually means that we end up in institutions, underfunded and inadequate institutions in many cases. I have thought for a while that Covid may have done a lot of fragile old people a favour by killing them relatively quickly. 

It is now the next day after I wrote this and I am still working on the laundry. I will also try to come up with a plan to feed and/or water the varied G’s when they get back from their quick and frustrating management trip. It is not and will not be easy for JG to clear up his brother’s detritus. He is, in fact, so aggravated by all of it that he says he plans to do a massive clearance of his own ‘stuff’ as soon as he gets home. I am faintly amused. I do not believe it is possible to clear up ahead of death, no matter how much planning and arranging you do.  

Nor do your plans for greeting the returned family, or for posting, last past the first challenge. It is now almost New Year’s Eve. Almost. One day to go. And it was my mother’s birthday and my parents’ wedding anniversary. My father always thought it was clever of him to have arranged to have both events on the same date – he could buy one bunch of yellow roses and cover all eventualities. I am not sure I ever heard my mother comment on this, but she did like yellow roses, so I guess it worked out. 

I am at a greater age now than my mother ever reached, but have six years to go to pass my father. He was lost for a while after my mother died, but he regrouped and made a new life for himself. He moved into an apartment in a retirement complex, made new friends and new interests. He even acquired a lady friend, a retired professor of languages, a wonderful and warm woman not unlike the wife he had lost. Jg and I were engaged in building the house we now live in, and he drove out from the city to supervise our progress. He organized a move for his widowed sister into another apartment in the complex and ran her life for her as well, adding countless codicils to her will, supervising her shopping and generally making sure she did well. I was booked as chauffer for many medical, dental and other appointments, if they were in spots where he did not care to drive. He was busy and he kept me busy too.

I have just glanced out my office window and I viewed an horrid mixture of snow, rain and ice pellets pelting down. I hope it quits before the YD decides to drive out here to spend New Year’s Eve. I hope it quits, period, but since this is December in eastern Ontario, it probably won’t. I was looking for a photo to post for a new year’s greeting and found some from our holiday in Bequia a few years ago. Sun and surf. Sigh.