Deathwatch. in A small but passable life.

Mom called last night. She wasn’t crying this time.

My little Sis is now at ‘home’ in hospice care. She insisted that the feeding tube be removed before she left the hospital. She is surrounded by “too many friends to count” as Mom puts it. Some of whom are former or current hospice nurses. She has her affairs in order. She wants to be cremated and her ashes scattered “somewhere green, not brown”. All three of her children have visited. Not the grandbabies though. there’re too young to have to remember their grandmother in such a state. She hasn’t eaten in three days. Mom says it is now just ice chips and morphine. Mom said that she is happy and content.

My little brother and sis-in-law will be there tonight. They are going to rent a car and stay there at Mom’s place for a week. Mom has been provided a bedroom of her own where my Sis is at. She says the house there has five bedrooms.

I told Mom to have my brother call me as soon as he can after arriving. I want to make sure he makes sure Mom is alright before they leave.

Mom said that she feels like I don’t need to be there since I’d seen Sis last Spring. And yeah, that was a good day. Sis was in chemo at the time, but still mobile. And I did give her a hug and told her I loved her before Mom and I left.

It’s only been six or seven months since Sis was diagnosed and chemo started. I guess the doc was right when he’d said that he’d never seen anything like that when she first went in.

There surely are genetic factors in play here. But I also wonder about environmental factors. Sis had a penny sized mole removed from her belly when she was small. She never smoked, drank, or did drugs but she did work a couple of years in high school as a waitress in a small, smoke filled café. (Remember those days?) She was always darker skinned and tanned darker without even trying. And of course we children all spent our childhoods growing up downriver from the Hanford site with all those leaking tanks of radioactive waste.

So yeah, we are a pragmatic family. So we’ll call it what it is. A deathwatch.