The Elder Report: A Death in the Family

Fay fell about a month ago. She landed on her tail bone. It was not a full blow. It was more of a sliding fall. Still, she felt sore afterwards. In the days that followed she kept complaining about the amount of pain she was experiencing. But she always complained about being in pain to some extent so, since she was still able to get around, we thought this was just something that would work itself out. The soreness would fade.

But that's not what happened. She continued to feel worse. A few Sundays ago, when I was looking after her, she asked me to get the wheelchair out of the back of her car. I asked her if she was going to stop walking. She said yes, it was becoming too painful to move. But she ate a good lunch. We talked about things she was reading. It was all pretty normal. Her mind seemed fine and she forgot about her request for the wheelchair. I left thinking she would be better by next weekend.

On the following Wednesday, Fay's primary caregiver, Ivanette, called Jennifer and said that Fay was requesting to go to the hospital. That was serious. From past illnesses, Fay hated hospitals and made Jennifer promise never to take her to another one. So, off she and Jennifer went to the ER to see if someone could figure out this intense pain that simply would not ease up.

Eventually a CT was ordered, which, thanks to Jennifer's intervention, was change to more of a full body scan instead of just the pelvis area. That's how they discovered that there was lump on one of her lungs. It was probably cancer but no one actually diagnosed it. Instead, she got a referral to an oncologist and a PET scan for the middle of the next week.

When she finally got settled back at her home, she began to worsen. The pain was unbearable. Jennifer called her primary physician with details of what was happening, who promptly ordered hospice and some stronger pain meds. She had been taking three percocets a day for years and that obviously wasn't enough anymore.

I was tied up with my mom and dad, so I could offer Jennifer little help beyond making trips over to my house to tend to our dogs and things there while she was away. I kept receiving text messages from her that she was doubling the meds. Soon she was changing the pain meds. Then doubling that amount. Finally, she was put on morphine.

Jennifer shines in moments like this. She organized 24/7 care for her mother to handle what she thought would be a slow recovery. Instead, her mother kept slipping away. Jennifer's brother, Jeff, flew in from Washington state for an indefinite stay. Avery came up from Atlanta to visit Fay and help out at home. I went over a couple of times. The first time was on a Monday. Fay was so sedated that she was only able to mumble to me. I told her I loved her and she weakly said the same back to me. By my second visit, on Thursday, she was completely unresponsive but at least she was finally comfortable.

She lasted another week like that. Gradually, she lost the ability to swallow anything. The morphine was administered under her tongue. Her breathing finally became more labored. Jennifer was exhausted from making sure her mom received more morphine every two hours. She thought she might leave her mom with an attendant and come home to get a good night's sleep. But she changed her mind. Surely Fay would pass that very night. So she stayed and her mother did finally draw her final breath during the night. Jennifer had been there when her father died seven years ago and she was there for her mom too.

She was not overly shaken by her mother's death. There was so much pain and the sudden probability of cancer adding to the long slow decline over the past couple of years of her strength and her interest in anything other than reading. Fay was a miserable person at the end and even if she taken better care of herself, something that always aggravated me about her, the cancer would have been an ordeal anyway.

Though her cancer was never confirmed (obviously, she never saw the oncologist) it was thought that the pain was likely from it having already spread into her bones and/or blood. Fortunately, Jeff was there to help out and deal with his own feelings about his mother's passing.

Now there is all the debris to be dealt with. Books and clothes and tools and utensils and china and artwork and antiques handed down from Fay's mother and father had to be sorted. Jennifer once more shines in organizing these sorts of situations. Her brother was by her side and she made full use of him. Things were recycled or sent to the goodwill or left for others to purchase and haul away. A lot of cleaning had to be done, especially in the garage. Poof! Within a matter of a couple of weeks, Fay's life was over and her residual life was quickly and efficiently dissipating.

One of the the many things Jennifer and Jeff had to sift through was her mom's iPad, which I requested she bring to me. Fay read her books on that device, in the largest font possible due to her failing eyesight. She and I often discussed what we were both reading and many of those conversations were quite heady and philosophical, or at least psychological, which was her profession, after all.

I knew Fay had an affinity for the writings of Ursula K. Le Guin. She shared her reading of that author with me and we would talk about whatever the story or topic was. There were a lot of essays that were short enough for me to read with her. Skimming through her kindle books, one particular essay caught my eye that she shared which we discussed and returned to in future conversations. It was typical of our relationship to talk at this level about things. I was given the honor to read part of this during her funeral service, as a remembrance of how Fay truly was. Here are the cherry-picked parts of the essay (actually a talk) to be found in Le Guin's book, Words Are My Matter, that I shared with those gathered in her church.

The Operating Instructions: A talk given at a meeting of Oregon Literary Arts in 2002

I think the imagination is the single most useful tool mankind possesses. It beats the opposable thumb. I can imagine living without my thumbs, but not without my imagination.

The imagination is an essential tool of the mind, a fundamental way of thinking, an indispensable means of becoming and remaining human.

Words are the wings both intellect and imagination fly on. Music, dance, visual arts, crafts of all kinds, all are central to human development and well-being, and no art or skill is ever useless learning; but to train the mind to take off from immediate reality and return to it with new understanding and new strength, nothing quite equals poem and story.

Home, imagined, comes to be. It is real, realer than any other place, but you can’t get to it unless your people show you how to imagine it—whoever your people are. They may not be your relatives. They may never have spoken your language. They may have been dead for a thousand years. They may be nothing but words printed on paper, ghosts of voices, shadows of minds. But they can guide you home. They are your human community. All of us have to learn how to invent our lives, make them up, imagine them. We need to be taught these skills; we need guides to show us how. Without them, our lives get made up for us by other people. 

Human beings have always joined in groups to imagine how best to live and help one another carry out the plan. The essential function of human community is to arrive at some agreement on what we need, what life ought to be, what we want our children to learn, and then to collaborate in learning and teaching so that we and they can go on the way we think is the right way.

Listening is an act of community, which takes space, time, and silence. Reading is a means of listening. Reading is not as passive as hearing or viewing. It’s an act: you do it. You read at your pace, your own speed, not the ceaseless, incoherent, gabbling, shouting rush of the media. You take in what you can and want to take in, not what they shove at you fast and hard and loud in order to overwhelm and control you. Reading a story, you may be told something, but you’re not being sold anything. And though you’re usually alone when you read, you are in communion with another mind. You aren’t being brainwashed or co-opted or used; you’ve joined in an act of the imagination.

Books may not be “books,” of course, they may not be ink on wood pulp but a flicker of electronics in the palm of a hand. Incoherent and commercialised and worm-eaten with porn and hype and blather as it is, electronic publication offers those who read a strong new means of active community. The technology is not what matters. Words are what matter. The sharing of words. The activation of imagination through the reading of words. The reason literacy is important is that literature is the operating instructions. The best manual we have. The most useful guide to the country we’re visiting, life.

Fay was cremated and her ashes divided between Jennifer and Jeff with the remaining third placed at the Georgia National Cemetery with her husband's. She would have been 92 in another couple of weeks. Jennifer's work to deal with the estate and all the stuff that was the life of her parents continues.