Quiet and Comfortable in Everyday Ramblings

My eldest sister loves old buildings as much as she cares for any person. She is fascinated by the history, every detail of the history of how they came to be. There are amazing stories baked into the buildings we inhabit and interact with, the whole human condition manifests in a detail here or there.

For the last ten years or so she has been researching public buildings in Seattle and writing their stories. She is passionate, enthusiastic and dogged in getting the stories right.

So this picture of the historic apartment building from the 1880s across the street from me I took last spring is for her. She doesn’t much like Portland but even she likes my old storied neighborhood and approves of its history.

I am writing about her in the present tense because she is currently still alive.

But it is just a matter of hours. There is no hope for her recovery at this point and her daughter and the rest of us have agreed to take her off life support tonight.

She was moved into ICU early Saturday morning and never regained consciousness.

She has had nothing that even vaguely resembles quality of life since then with tubes in her every which way and nothing happening naturally because they are pumping all sorts of drugs into her. They are finally giving her enough sedation to make her comfortable and calm.

Yesterday the staff told my family not to interact with her or comfort her because it caused her to be agitated. That is heartbreaking. Crazy-making in fact.

I tell you from my heart, this is not the way to go out.

She was scared and didn’t understand and trusted the doctors and never filled out an advanced directive or what we call a POLST here that clearly defines her wishes in circumstances like this, leaving the decision making primarily to her daughter to make these hard hard choices for her.

This all has been making the rest of us uncomfotable. And, umm, pissed.

She could have spent these last five days, conscious, surrounded by those she loves, with her pain managed in a palliative care, hospice environment. Instead she is attached to this mind-boggling expensive array of equipment and flinches when you touch her and is unable to communicate or be home.

She is ten days shy of her 71st birthday.

I know with Mr. Finch it took a lot to convince him that we could manage his pain and help with the breathing and give him good quality of life with coherent interactions with those he loved.

My sister just couldn’t face the fear. It makes sense; she was hospitalized a great deal as a child, with polio and spinal meningitis.

And here she is facing down the biggest fear of all.

I know this sounds kind of odd, but she loved hippopotamuses. She really does/did. So my hope is that her spirit takes on that form in a place that is safe and protected and she just gets to hang around eating sweet grass in the mud before she tries this human thing again.

Last updated January 22, 2015