This is the end of an April narrative; the outcome of a sequence of events; the end result. I wrote the first installment on April 3rd. This is the final installment, at least of this part of my sister's story. Sharon died this morning around 4:30 am after a short four weeks, a long four days of rapidly degenerating life. She died at home in her bedroom.
| "Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidi in ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerunt: Sebulla pe theleis; respondebat illa: apothanein thelo."
(Petronius epigraph from "The Wasteland")
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Last night I sent my niece, my sister's daughter back to her own apartment in downtown Seattle for a few hours of sleep – a luxury she hadn't had for around four days of continuous in-home care of her mother. My sister was a demanding, typically querulous woman in her everyday life and much of this temperament was exaggerated these last four weeks since her first doctor visit on March 30, 2007. Sharon has only had hospice care since Monday morning – really, just the delivery of a hospital bed, one use of a too-wide wheelchair, a couple trips down the hall in a walker and three comforting hour-long hospice nurse visits; one each day from Monday through Wednesday.
For 45 minutes between 3:30 am and 4:15 am Thursday morning, I sat next to her bedside and held her hand, and discussed "stuff" with her. There was no visible recognition that she heard; she was last coherent on Tuesday night. But I wanted her to know some things. How proud I was that she had moved forward after the death of her husband in 2002 and gotten many elements of her life organized. Not the most important one, perhaps – the future of her disabled son. But that's a topic for another day. I told her that we would take care of things and that she was not to worry.
I discussed politics, always the topic we circled around to whenever we talked. She was a Democrat, but one who is swayed by sparkling rhetoric or appearance politics. There was a day a few weeks ago that we had a long discussion about Chuck Hagel. I'm too fried to discuss details in this diary tonight, but it was one of those pro and con arguments where appearance trumps voting record and appearance then wins with the voting populace – in this case, my sister the surface voter. I thought I had more time to bring heavier weapons to bear. In the end it didn't matter.
She made a comment last week which was eerily similar to one of the themes of my diary Rose of Sharon, where I commented on losing a sister in the midst of Watergate, and now a sister in the midst of another corrupt Republican administration and the attendant current Congressional investigations.
Thirty four years ago, there was a second term Republican administration, enmeshed in fruitless war, enthralled with crime and corruption, on the brink of destruction from Congressional hearings. I had an ill sister, dying of cancer in those late spring months; by mid-June she was dead.
Now, we have a fully corrupt second term Republican administration in the White House, involved in an illegitimate war, perched on the ledge above Congressional hearings that will likely extend out through election year 2008. Now I have an ill sister again, perhaps dying of cancer, just so. How circular life can be, concentric even.
Sharon brought up Jackie, our oldest sister and she mourned that she would also never get to see what happens with Gonzales. I had never told her that I wrote about this peculiar irony on Dailykos and it's interesting that she would draw a similar parallel.
I told her I knew how glad she was that if she was going to die, that it was going to be fast. I admitted to her how hard it was to see her look so much like our mother now. How proud I was that she had the courage and adventurous spirit to take a solo five day vacation to San Antonio one year ago in April 2006.
Her trip to San Antone was the only trip she took by herself in her 68 years of life. She asked me before she left last year if I thought it was alright for her to remove her wedding ring when she was on her trip. Of course I said yes. Yes, it was alright.
Sharon was married to a man who disliked travel and disliked organization and timeliness of any kind; as a traveling salesman for Motorola in the late fifties and early sixties, my brother-in-law traveled enough and developed a dislike for constant movement and this subsequently dictated the homegrown terms of the couple's lack of mobility. That and the reality of providing care for their disabled son, discussed in this diary Not the diary I should write. In the predictable pattern of decades of married life, Sharon and Dick took two vacations in forty years – a honeymoon to Hawaii in 1961 and a ten-day trip to England in 1976 that my brother-in-law Dick won on sales bonus.
She had apparently longed to see the Alamo all of her adult life and to see the bluebonnets of San Antonio and so she did just that by herself last year. Who knew? Her favorite color was cornflower-bluebell blue and I think she still dreamed of falling in love with a tall drink of a Texan. That was a phrase of hers, used to describe her favorite country singers, Alan Jackson and George Strait. It was also a sprouted reference, grown from thousands of nights of western romance novel plots, nourished in those late dark night hours when others in the house were asleep. The man in her dreams was not the one that she had been married to. However, in her mind, marriage was a decision made for life and mitigated only by death.
Tonight I feel a deeply sad empathy for her desire to find love again after many years of an often stifling, often penniless forty year marriage to one man. A good man who, sadly, gave up trying to meet my sister's expectations, and she, his, years ago after too much heartache and too much loss and too much accumulated ennui. The odds were stacked against her from the start. Four decades of learned behavior in one relationship. The death of a first born at age six. A developmentally and mentally disabled adult son. A difficult relationship with her daughter, her sister (our oldest), her mother (our mother). A limited retirement income. Significantly overweight and a two-pack a day smoker. Not so easy a role as retiree love object. But, you see, Sharon had a smile so bright that it could light a stadium. On the other hand, she had a temper so foul that you never really wanted to enter her house again. The odds, it turns out, were even more against her than we knew.
I spent most of the night awake with her. Her rapid, shallow vocalized breathing was audible throughout the first floor of the house, but I did scatter in a couple of half hour periods of sleep of my own. In our last discussion around 4 AM, I told her it was okay to go when she was ready. I went back to the living room to nap and startled awake only a half an hour later, the house so quiet, to find her gone.
"For with my own eyes I saw the Sibyl hanging in a jar at Cumae, and when the boys said to her, 'Sibyl, what do you want?' she replied, 'I want to die.'"
(translated Petronius epigraph from "The Wasteland", T.S. Eliot)
Listen. If you have something to do in life, or there are things you don't want to leave undone but you're waiting for the right time to start them, don't wait. Do them now.
There's an analogy here that I'm too tired and unsubtle tonight to draw.