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[OM] The end of a journey

Subject: [OM] The end of a journey
From: Paul Braun <pbraun42@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sun, 02 Feb 2014 15:50:50 -0600
I meant to post this earlier, but this past week has been simply insane.

My wife's mother, who was 95, had been in the hospital for about a 
week-and-a-half due to a severe systemic infection.  She had been on 
some antibiotics, but what we didn't realize is that it was slowly 
getting worse and that, at 95, your body really just isn't equipped to 
fight back that much.  And the hospital stay really wasn't doing much.  
A week ago Monday, we made the decision to have her transferred to the 
hospice center here in town to allow her to rest comfortably without all 
of the confusion of being in a hospital. She finally passed away this 
past Thursday.

The end wasn't very pleasant, even with the medications that the hospice 
angels were giving her.

Adrienne was fiercely loyal to her family.  But to others, she was a 
lifelong non-social person.  We tried to get her to take a roommate at 
the assisted-living facility, but she was having none of that. Guess it 
was too much to hope that she'd change after 90-some years....

We just finished emptying out her apartment.  The thing that my wife and 
I find both hilarious and bewildering is that every time we'd go see her 
or talk to her on the phone, she'd complain about the conditions and 
that she needed to get out of there ASAP. (I know that some 
assisted-living places are, in fact, bad news.  But this place was 
brand-new, clean, comfortable, and all of the help were extremely 
nice).  But as we were carrying her stuff out, everyone we met told us 
how much they loved Adrienne and how she always asked how they were 
doing or how their family was...  It's like there was "Mom while we're 
here" and "Mom when we're not".

We were very concerned even at the end - at the hospital, the evaluated 
her and said that yes, she definitely qualified for hospice care and 
they didn't think she'd last more than three or four days.  But she kept 
hanging in there.  Even this past Monday, while they were installing our 
furnace, the VNA called and told my wife if she wanted to say goodbye, 
that now was the time.  Yet, she hung in there.  The way Medicare works, 
when you go into hospice, they will pay 100% up to 10 days, after that, 
you have the choice to bring her home and get home hospice care, or pay 
on your own at $550 a day.  Thursday was the 10th day.  It's almost like 
she was just hanging in to maximize her Medicare benefits....

This photo, which some of you may remember, was taken last year when we 
took her out for Mothers' Day dinner.  At this point, she was 94.

She was pretty lucid and feisty almost up to the end (we took her back 
to the seafood place for her birthday in December), but she had declined 
pretty rapidly in the past year.  She'd been through several major 
losses in her life, including her parents (her mom died was living with 
them when the house burned and her mother died in the fire), her brother 
sometime after Sheri and I were married, her husband back in 1981 or 82, 
and my brother-in-law, her baby boy, two years ago.  I think Terry's 
death really took a lot of the wind out of her sails.

So now, we sort the estate out ( there wasn't much left at the end) and 
continue to fight the VA for the housing benefits she qualified for but 
they have been denying us for the past two years.  For crying out loud, 
she was mid-90's, not well, and the widow of a WWII veteran.  She 
qualified for the money.

And then we move on with life.  Both Sheri and I are completely out of 
parents at this point.  Quite frankly, I've had enough death in my life 
in the past year.  I really need a break.

http://zone-10.com/tope2/main.php?g2_itemId=5293

-- 



Paul Braun
Certified Music Junkie
Valparaiso, IN


"It's such a fine line between stupid, and clever." - David St. Hubbins

"Music washes from the soul the dust of everyday life" - Harlan Howard

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