How do you want to die? This is a question everyone should think about and answer for themselves. I have. I have a very strict advanced directives document. I am not afraid to die, I am afraid to live in massive pain or a situation that will make me miserable or break emotionally or financially the ones I love. Especially after watching people I love die and people I love dying.
I have been very depressed all week and crying all morning. My mother, 76, has been in the ICU the last week after having vascular surgery on her legs. They just moved her to a regular room yesterday. All she wants to do is go home, when she can’t even move herself in bed. My dad, 81 cannot help her. My sister and I offer but she refuses, and I cannot move my mother because of my own physical problems. She is not wealthy enough to have a full time nurse.
A couple of weeks ago my mom and I were sitting outside talking about what we can live with, how we want to end up, how we want to die. I said, “I will off myself before I become a prisoner in a nursing home.” My mom agreed with me. At the time. My feeling is that we are constantly given choices, prolong our lives, but sometimes at the expense of our personal and physical freedom. My mom keeps making choices that will end with the one she said she did not want to live with. She has chosen to prolong her life over and over at the expense of her mobility and other quality of life choices. Now the hospital wants to move her to a nursing facility, because she can’t stay in the hospital and cannot go home. She has put herself in the place she did not want to be. Dependent on others, trapped by her body, trapped by decisions she is no longer in control of.
When my husband got cancer he was not diagnosed until two days before he died. He worked up until two weeks before he died. Maybe if he had been diagnosed earlier he could have had chemo, and still would not have lived, and been sicker and could not have worked. He had a very virulent cancer. He filled out a DNR a week before he died, when he realized what was going on. He refused a respirator which would have prolonged his life. He did die in the hospital, in hospice at the VA which he was moved to the day before he died. Only because they had told us the whole time they did not know what was wrong with him except he had pneumonia. I tried hard to get him home, the doctors promised me he could come home the day after the diagnosis, but then reneged because of other things. I would have wanted him home, he wanted to go home, but accepted he was not going to make it and died the next day. My husband taught me how to die.
Whether we want to or not, these are things we should all think about and put in writing. Free Advanced Directives. How do you want to die? To me it is also the same question as: How do you want to live?
PS. I want to apologize for two diaries today. I wasn’t planning on writing this but have had no way to let out all my painful feelings at this time.