## 251129: saturday, a long visit, almost painful to witness

So the move to the Carroll didn't happen on Friday; I didn't really expect it.

I went out and ran a bunch of errands that morning, and stopped in briefly
at the Hospice house to see Mom.  She seemed in good spirits, but as I had
groceries warming up in the car and the staff was about to come in and get her
cleaned up anyways, I didn't stay long.  The next day, however, I went up in
the early afternoon and stayed there for quite a while.

On a total whim I grabbed a couple of her old photo albums, from her own
youth and early married life, thinking that she'd enjoy reviewing some of
those memories.  I walked into her room holding these, and she was like
"what's all that?" and I said "this ... is your *life*!" and almost started
bawling on the spot.  I'm choking up a bit just writing this.  Even from an
early age, from a teenage obsession with horses and everything that came
after, her life had rich content.  Here were her high school prom pictures
with some random guy who's long-forgotten, and then lots of beach scenes
from the Jersey shore with her recently-married husband -- they went there
frequently, after moving from Bethesda MD to NJ early in my Dad's career
as a research chemist.  There's a whole 'nother album from when the pharma
company sent my Dad to their parent office in Basel Switzerland for half a
year, so when I was about 2 years old we all moved there for the whole stint
and I really don't remember any of it.  But my Dad's lifetime high point of
pride was climbing the Matterhorn, and there are many photos of the three
of us going up various other mountain slopes over that era of our lives.

Anyway, Mom's response to having this in front of her was apathetic at best,
with a few little sparks of happy recognition.  She's been zoinked out of her
gourd on painkillers over the past few days, of course, and taking in almost
no food except an occasional bowl of ice cream.  She in fact ate one of those
while I was there, and it was almost painful to watch as she could barely bring
the spoon up to her mouth.  The ongoing decline is obvious.  She could barely
speak, incoherently searching for words and making very little sense.  She's
scheduled to be moved to the retirement-campus nursing facility on Monday,
and just watching her today I sort of wonder if she's even going to make
it that far.  I told the hospice folks to call me any time day or night if
anything looked like it was radically changing.

I relayed this info to a few trusted neighbors/friends at the retirement
community, and they know that Mom's pretty tough, having undergone this whole
drop-foot neuropathy thing and nonetheless been out there doing a mile+ around
the campus with her foot-brace and rollator almost every morning.  She's
regarded as sort of a hero around here, at age 95 and still staying active as
best she can.  With "the end" in sight now, said friends want to hang out
with me and do dinner in the central dining room, likely to get my thoughts
on everything that's happening as it plays out.

I expect that within December, I'll be doing the whole "estate thing" and can
hopefully get most of what's needed done within my original assumed timeframe
of leaving right after Christmas.  I've created this "diary" as the second
chapter in Mom's history of weird afflictions, the first of which she semi-
miraculously recovered from and then stayed rock-solid (albeit rather bored
of life) for another three years.  For that saga, knock off the /25/ at the
end of this index URL or see the links in earlier sections.

The key wish that Mom's expressed to me many times is "I want to die holding
your hand".  I think that will ultimately happen.  I'm tearing up again while
writing that, but I'm so glad that I'll have that opportunity.  Again, it's
just a question of when, and I can be right there by her bedside for whenever
that time comes.  Then it's a call to the body-donation brokers, saying
"come-n-git-her".  That's medcure.org, who is just doing awesome work
with making the whole death scenario so much more manageable.

I've got Sunday in between now and the prospective move, and I have no idea
what will play out over that time.  I'll go up to the Hospice house tomorrow
and hang out with her, and that's probably one early part of my "watch"
heading into the inevitable.