So, I visited my mother today for the first time in months. She's in a nursing home about an hour away and they shut it down to visitors in March. Then she got sick with Covid-19. We didn't think she'd survive, but she got through it. However, it knocked her down and she can't get up.
Before she was walking (with a walker) freely around the hall, getting herself to the bathroom, dressing herself, feeding herself. Now she can't walk, and I'm not sure she really knew who I am. She's sad but otherwise there's nothing going on. She isn't really aware of the world and can't really have a conversation. The flame is flickering.
This has not always been a part of the human condition. Until maybe the mid 20th Century, nobody survived long in her condition. I get the account of her monthly billings from the insurance company and it's typically many thousands of dollars. Personally, I wouldn't live that way. The trouble is, by the time you get there, you can't make your own choices any more. I don't have the answer.
My mother was a schoolteacher who knew everybody in town, whose students and their parents remembered her and loved her and kept in touch. She had a worthwhile life, until my father's years-long terminal illness that pretty much squeezed the juice of life out of her. But she hung on for the next ten years. Now the end is coming.
As you know, Cervantes, my mother is also in "a place" that just got hammered hard by COVID-19--about half the residents tested positive and at least three have died. She tested negative, but had chest pains and was put in the ER. Now she's in rehab. Still ticking, but less and less aware of who we are and where she is. I know for a fact that she never wanted to be this way, because we discussed it while she still had some of her marbles (although in some ways, she was always crazy, having narcissistic personality disorder; but she had a lot of beautiful qualities).
ReplyDeleteIt would be nice if there were some Vonnegut-esque way for us to assign iron-clad orders to be carried out in case we become what we didn't want to.
Well, our moral instincts make that very unlikely I think. Most people seem to tolerate the idea that a person in extremis could make a choice to die, but proactively taking the life of someone who is unable to ask for it in the present, even if they specified such a preference in the past, seems a bridge too far for most people.
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