GRACE AND DIGNITY FOR AGING MILLENNIALS

I became my ‘brother’s keeper’ through misjudgment, and it wasn’t my brother but my father in-law.

Same idea, though. I think it’s the same idea.

And it was misjudgment, not a mistake.

What happened?

The old man lived the assisted living life a few miles away.

My mother in-law, wife, kids, and Daisy the hot dog, all lived together.

Step father in-law had the Parkinson’s and the dementia, and we visited him.

On Sundays Ma would pick him up and bring him home for a few hours.

They’d recently moved here and were still settling in after his diagnosis in SoCal where he started falling and couldn’t get up.

We were all settling in.

What I had was two early-teen sons and a mother-daughter combo with regular visits from the assisted-liver.

 

What I Didn’t Know, What I Found Out

As often happens in these sort of situations, assisted living didn’t live up to its name.

The old man aspirated food, inhaled something, caught pneumonia, and ended up waiting to die in the local hospital.

What I didn’t know what the determination of my mother in-law to stay by his side until the end.

Right by his bedside where he was hooked up to IV’s, oxygen, legs encased in pumping foam cushions for circulation, the end of life works.

In hardly any time her own health took a turn for the worse, but she stayed on schedule.

I told the doctor she didn’t look good. He agreed.

I said she looked like she was fading. He agreed.

How long could this to on? He didn’t know.

Another day or two might be too much for her.

And him, he said.

What I heard was the old man had another day or two to live so to ease the transition I decided to bring him to the house, to clear out my writing room/library/official office and turn it into a hospital room.

You don’t have to be a former Army medic to do this, but it helped.

The old man came home for his last stand that same day.

After a restless first night I spoke to the comatose man in my former writing room.

He’d been a WWII Marine and I aimed to return the old man to those hard charging days one last time.

And it worked. He opened his eyes, shifted his hands.

I stood him up, told him he looked pretty damn good, and laid him back down in correct assisting manner.

It worked so well he perked up, gained twenty pounds, and lived another five good years.

Was it worth it? Yes, first to the boys. They got to see a stage of life their friends didn’t see.

They also got to race wheelchairs, make the assisted lift chair do things it wasn’t built to do, and witness adults caring over a lifespan.

 

Grace And Dignity For Millennials

By January 2017 both my in-laws had passed, my mom and dad too, and I started chemo and radiation.

I’d been testing for months and now it was all set in motion.

Go time.

The big news in the big world was the presidential inauguration.

I needed to change gears from good to bad to worse in order to get better, so that’s what I did.

It felt like America was on the same path and it may seen weird but my thought while getting my head locked down and stabilized on the radiation table was about the similarities between presidents and chemo doctors.

One guy employs confusion, can’t say what’s going on, and throws everything at the problem to clear inventory.

The other guy explains in minute detail how his research indicates a specific remedy.

First Guy: Three chemos and a chemo pump.

Other Guy: One chemo, no pump.

Former president: They can’t hear your boos, but they can hear your vote. (Hey J-Ray)

Current president: $^&^^^%#$##!@*&^%$$.

 

I remember feeling like a baby abandoned at the bus depot in January 2017.

I’m not a seeker of a father figure, the dad I never had, or a ghost, but I felt something feral back then, like there’s a sneak who decides they’ll give themselves permission to unplug life support on people.

But that would never happen, would it?

And then:

 

 

And then:

 

“Many medical trials were stopped in the middle — meaning those patients suddenly didn’t receive the treatments they were getting, because the funding stopped,” says Mariana Stern, professor of preventive medicine and urology at the Keck School of Medicine of USC and chair of the report committee.

 

If that doesn’t send a chill up your spine then you probably haven’t had everything fail to stop cancer until you agreed to a new clinical trial that sent whatever creepy crawling crap back to where it came from.

The sign in the chemo lounge bathroom said, “Flush Twice.”

Instead, the patients were flushed.

The new medical standards didn’t affect me, but the genius moves of the self-described smart man ended medical trials in the middle of treatment for people depending on it for their lives.

No dignity.

No grace.

 

PS:

Looking back, I got lucky.

I feel luckier than three rocks on the beach.

 

PSS:

Play it, Paul:

 

Oh, little darling of mine
I can’t for the life of me
Remember a sadder day
I know they say let it be
It just don’t work out that way
And the course of a lifetime runs
Over and over again

No, I would not give you false hope (no)
On this strange and mournful day
But the mother and child reunion
Is only a motion away