Through the process of being my daughter’s caregiver, I did a lot of thinking about “last.” What I mean is… What if this is the LAST thing I say to my daughter? What if this is the LAST touch she ever feels? What if this is the LAST thing I do for her?
Living so intensely for so long between my daughter’s life and death, it’s hard not to think about that. When she was steadily losing weight (very long story) and we didn’t know why other than she just couldn’t eat, and just couldn’t keep anything down, I would be screaming at her to eat. I was so terrified that losing so much weight would shut down her organs.
She went down to about 72 pounds. At least that’s what she was the last time we had the guts to put her on a scale. She looked like the pictures that you see of people in concentration camps. She was completely mortified about ever letting me even see her body. It was truly excruciating when she did get undressed to look at her “impassively” without showing my horror at how she looked. So my “brilliant” way of handling this was to scream at her to eat. Fear and terror really take their toll and I was going a bit nuts!
Until… one night it finally dawned on me that maybe if this was her time to “leave” this world, I didn’t want her life to end with my shrill shrieking in her head. It was like “duh,” this is not how I want her life to end. So I managed to stop… just kept the shrieking in my head (that’s one of the reasons for my having post traumatic stress disorder… not being able to “process” or wrap my head around what was going on).
Of course, thinking about “last” things made me think about my own life also. Having cancer myself made “lasts” pretty important again. This has been a very good lesson (albeit one I really would rather have done without, but…) about how I want to live life and “go” in the world.
Tomorrow isn’t guaranteed, neither is the next second.
BLESSINGS TO ALL!
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