Four months, four deaths

Four months, four deaths

Death was mostly a concept until I held my beloved cat in my arms and watched the vet administer the euthanasia agent.

After the second stroke, which put him into a coma-like sleep, there was no chance of my dear 15 YO feline friend ever recovering. With me through thick and thin, many moves and many seasons, it was inconceivable to lose him.

What I had been dreading for years was happening. Eyes closed and swaddled in a blanket, I felt his body sink and become heavy as his spirit flew away. There he was: beautiful, quiet, still…gone.

Death was mostly an abstraction until I got the text that my husband’s mother had passed away.

A heart attack two weeks prior placed her in the hospital and eventually hospice, where she would spend her final days.

She had been imprisoned in her body for several years after suffering from repeated strokes. Unable to walk, bathe herself or use the toilet, she spent her days in a wheelchair, frustrated by her inadequate ability to speak or follow the conversations around her.

I like to imagine that when she passed she grew wings and flew to meet up with the vivacious woman she once was, flourishing somewhere in another place and time.

Death was mostly a word until I first saw it with my own eyes.

We got the call before 7:00 am in the morning. We should come immediately, as he could pass at any time. For hours we sat by his bed, a steady stream of teary-eyed visitors coming and going.

Around 2:45 pm they shooed all of us out of the room so they could change the bed and make him more comfortable.

Only minutes later, when we arrived back in his room he was between two breaths — with the space between the second to the last and the last seeming like eternity (the Cheyne-Stokes breathing signaling that death is near) — and it appeared he was gone.

“Is he…dead?”, I whispered. I was mildly irritated that we all might have missed his final minutes on this earth.

After a lengthy pause another labored breath surfaced. And that was his last.

I had know him for less than a year. He had a beautiful smile that radiated joy and eyes that sparkled, the same smile and sparkle that live on in my husband, his son.

Death was something that happened to someone else — until it happened to me.

My aunt, a retired nurse, lifted a corner of the bed sheet. I could see my Dad’s knees and feet were a blotchy purplish color. This I would learn is mottling, is a sign that death is very near.

Alzheimer’s stole his mind. A massive heart attack was now taking his body. One by one his organs were shutting down.

I listened for the irregular breathing. When it started, I turned to my husband, buried myself in his jacket and broke down.

This. Is. It. The “it” that you cannot believe you are witnessing. Only two weeks after my father-in-law passed my Dad was getting ready to join him.

Is there a word beyond devastated? Greater than agony? Stronger than catastrophe?

Pummeled by four losses in four months, we understood death like never before.

* * * * *

Death is universal.

Death is inescapable.

Death has been happening ad infinitum but until it happens to you, in the deepest, most intimate and most direct way, it is mostly a concept, an abstraction, a word.

You will never look at life the same.

* * * * *

Jetson (1996–2012)
Genevieve Letness (1926–2012)
George Letness (1925–2012)
Allan John Kolles (1931–2012)