Some of you know that my stepmom was gravely ill with end stage Parkinson's- this is just a little something about the last days, and how we handled things.
Oh good folks and people! I have missed you, having been away for roughly 6 weeks with minimal connectivity. I know we don't all know each other, but I love reading your voices. That said, on to the topic sentence... I've been away from home for this extended period trying to manage the impending, now completed, death of my stepmother from advanced Parkinson's disease. I have learned more about that (and I have a medical background) than I ever wanted to know. Plus funeral planning. I felt like such a stupid ass to have to be told to look at the back of the floral cards for details on the arrangement and the sender's address. But it was a lovely service, despite the plan for it being a minute to minute moving target.
Dad wanted something good to come from a bad death, and to be perfectly honest, it was hideous. This lovely woman had lost even the ability to close her eyes in those last days. So to that good end, he (and me) managed to arrange through the regional Parkinson's foundation a donation of her brain to a study at the Texas Tech medical school. They did the harvest so neatly that, with the help of a decent mortuary person, that it had been done at all was almost undetectable. So beautifully that Dad was able to allow the service to go forward as open casket. She kept a small stuffed cat with her all these many months, holding it constantly, in lieu of her real cat. It's in the casket with her, peeking out from the curtain on the lower half.
We asked that, instead of flowers, donations be made to Parkinson's research, and the letters from the West Texas office started to flow in today, letting us know of the people who had donated in her memory. Maybe something good will come from this. It's been hard to watch, even harder to orchestrate, especially as decisions had to be made to let her die. I can see all the places in which I should have been more forceful, or less demanding, but isn't the hindsight always clearer? More morphine, sooner. Not timid about making sure that it was gotten.
I know I'm not writing well, or very coherently. I apologize for that, and ask your forbearance. This has just been much harder than I thought it would be, even for pragmatic me. I just want to encourage as many people as possible to support research that finds a cure for this horrible disease.