## 251221: The inevitable passing

It was now almost a "going to work" vibe, as I got up every morning and headed
over to the Carroll to keep Mom company.  By Friday morning she had become
pretty unresponsive, but given the assumption that she was still hearing and
processing everything that arrived at the ears, I talked to her about all of
yesterday's fun and various other thoughts about what would transpire after
she departed the mortal coil.  In this somewhat write-only matrix, I could
only hope it was reassuring and comforting to her.  In between I ensconced
myself into the big recliner chair provided in the room, working on processing
the images from my big I Ching artwork shoot, and eventually was ready to
upload them to the website for public perusal.  Given what some folks viewing
that resource have noted, I will qualify that Mom grew up as a total horse
enthusiast as a teenager, and became quite good at drawing them.

Toward late afternoon Mom started making rather distraught-sounding grunting
noises on exhalations, which would make anyone wonder if she was in agonizing
pain or something, but the staff and the Empath booklet assured me that this
is totally normal for these stages.  There was no visible evidence of pain in
her face or how she held her arms, and they'd upped the routine opiate doses a
bit in the meantime anyways, so I was confident that she was okay.  The staff
here, guided by the Hospice folks, had shown such dedication to her comfort
that I trusted them implicitly to do the right things.

While the wifi-calling pipe remained adequately stable, I got a call from the
main Post Office back home, from someone apologizing that my accumulated mail
had *not* been delivered on the specified hold end date, because they were down
a carrier that day.  He noticed that I'd just put in for another mail-hold,
so I explained the whole situation to him, and assured him that a neighbor
was picking up the batches and the second hold was by design.  He expressed
sympathy for my situation and basically said "no worries, do what you have to
do" and was totally cool with how I was handling my extended absence.  Later
I synced up with said neighbor, who had safely retrieved the batch dump and
was holding it for my eventual return.  Mostly junkmail, of course, but I'd
sort it all out when I eventually returned north.

At one point a guy showed up at the room door and introduced himself as the
chaplain from the Hospice organization.  Among many other services they can
provide, spiritual support is among them, so he had come by to see if I needed
anything in that realm.  I warned him that Mom and I were hard-line atheists,
and that she had done quite a bit of writing on significant *disfavor* of
religions as a whole, but he seemed intrigued by that.  As the one guy in
that role for Hospice he had to deftly handle discussions with people of
just about all (or none) religious persuasions, so he was happy to discuss
a broad field of topics and feelings.  I showed him Mom's website and told
him about the general tenor of books she had written, and he seemed eager to
know more.  It was an opening of perspective for him, and I was happy to fuel
that as best as I could given that our principal spokesperson on such topics
was lying in front of us apparently gasping for breath.

I even showed him a few of the I Ching images I'd been processing, which
contain a lot of sexual implications and pagan symbolism, and it didn't faze
him a bit.  That entire set finally got processed and is now available online
for perusal.  If I find a well-enough preserved source for the tarot deck
images in Mom's media archives, I'll eventually put those up there as well.

I returned to "on duty" status Saturday morning, and it seemed to be status
quo.  Mom was still making plaintive noises on every out-breath, but I knew
to take that in stride by now.  She was no longer responding to any talking or
hand-grabs, so I accepted that the capability to do that was gone but she
might still be hearing me.  I gave her an update on the previous day and how
several friends and friends-of-friends had sent me their thoughts and support,
and then while just thinking about that path to her consciousness, had another
"moment" of wrenching grief.  Even before she was gone.  At this point it felt
like the whole process of passing was already taking too long, especially
after reading descriptions from other folks about how the "transition" process
they dealt with was done in a day and a half or less.  But, y'know -- Mom was
one tough ol' gal, and her body was probably going to fight this decline in
every way it could until completely overwhelmed.

But that was pretty much the end of that.  I was up early Sunday morning,
December 21, the Solstice day, and headed back over to the nursing center
to be present for whenever things might progress.  Mom had finally stopped
emitting the pitiful whines, but while still obviously alive, the breathing
was fairly short and labored.  I asked the nurse if shutting down the oxygen
concentraor, which wasn't doing much good by now, might actually help the
progression.  The nurse asserted that sure, it wasn't actually keeping her
alive, it was just a comfort aspect, so it wouldn't matter much at this point.
We shut down the machine and pulled the cannula off.  Then I sat with Mom for
another couple of hours, and the nurse came in for routine checks and dosages.
The two of us were standing on either side of her bed just talking about
circumstance, and then the nurse looked down at Mom and said "Hmm, is that
something different?" ... I saw that Mom's throat was sort of palpitating
in a different way than it had been, and neither of us could really feel a
meaningful pulse in her neck or wrists.  The nurse assured me again that this
progression was "normal" and popped out of the room, needing to attend to
other responsibilities and leaving me to my ongoing vigil.

So in the next ten minutes or so, I watched the entire progression of dying.
I could normally see a pulse rate in a part of Mom's carotid artery in her
neck; that was now almost invisible, and then started fluttering in a very
unusual way.  The hand that I *wasn't* holding began twitching a bit, and in
the next two minutes or so as I watched, the twitching and fluttering died
down and stopped.  I waited for another couple of minutes to see any signs
of activity resume, and they didn't.  So ... that was it, she was gone, and
I had witnessed the entire process up close and personal.  And while she wasn't
really "holding" my hand, I had a finger or two run through hers, so she sort
of got her wish of wanting to die holding my hand.  It was still a profound
moment and I'm glad I was there to witness the entire thing.  I waited a bit
longer and then wandered down the hall to find the nurse; said "Okay, we might
as well call it officially 9:00 AM, I think that's it".  We went back to the
room and she spent about a minute on the stethescope listening for any further
signs of heart activity, and declared the official time as 09:03 AM.  Thus,
my mother, Barbara G. Walker of varied crafts and literary fame, died on the
Winter Solstice of 2025 around 9 in the morning.  Her light went out with the
Sun, but would not return as the celestial cycles eternally would.

For the small number of people who had learned of this and said "she's in a
better place", no, frankly, the absolute best place she could have been was in
the Carroll facility for this whole passage that she'd paid into in advamce,
and now she was simply gone.  No longer in any identifiable "place" at all.

Now Mom was a cadaver, and many logistics needed to happen around that.  The
nurse called Medcure from the specs I had given her; their answering service
passed the message on but only phrased it as "we need a pickup" without enough
detail to really handle the case.  They failed to call back within the promised
hour.  I called them myself later and now reached the Medcure folks proper,
explained the situation again, and they said they hadn't gotten any outstanding
pickup request in the database so I basically started the process over from
the beginning.  Th' fuck?!  We were now an hour and a half past death at this
point, with Mom laying there ready for departure after a bit of cleanup by the
facility staff.  She wasn't really going cold yet, that takes a while.  But now
Medcure needed some kind of promise about which physician was going to sign the
death certificate before they'd dispatch anyone from a funeral home, so it was
a bit of phone-tag between Carroll and Tidewell and Medcure and they finally
got it worked out as to who was going to finally sign off on the passing.  And
then they needed a whole Docusign thing about vital statisics and background
data.  I fucking *hate* Docusign, their website is super-dysfunctional unless
you have *just* the right browser environment.  Their web devs have no goddamn
clue about browser-neutrality or backward compatibility, which given their
supposed legal status as an "action recorder" [as opposed to "wet signature"]
facility, they really should work to make themselves more accessible and stop
generating junk like corrupt incompatible PDFs of completed transactions.
Anyway, I managed to grind through it, and however it was set up, it didn't
even need a "signature" box.

The closest funeral home in the Medcure network was way down in Naples, about an hour out, but they found a driver and sent him out to us, and the extraction process was actually fairly fast. The guy came in the fire exit at the outer end of the wing with a gurney and accompanied by site Security, the bed got cranked up to its maximum height, he wrapped Mom up in whatever sheets were still on the bed and hauled her over to the gurney, and out the fire-door we all went. As he loaded Mom into the van I saw that he already had another body in there; both would reside in their freezers overnight and then Mom would be transported up to Medcure's research facility in Orlando the next day.

So ... that was basically "it" -- I was now in post-mortality phase.  I updated
a couple of online forums as to what was going on, and then went back to the
house to fetch the car and a couple of large crates to drive back to Carroll
and load all the stuff out of Mom's temporary room.  Sometime during that I
had a great convo with the funeral-director folks about the death-certificate
process, and how much of it can get done electronically and take about a week
depending on how quickly the hospice doctors sign off on various things.  They
even sent some guideline material on what types of institutions would need
"short form" or "long form" certificates, the latter of which include the
cause of death and some other info.  This helped assure me that I might have
those in hand before the end of the year instead of the "4 - 6 weeks" that
other sources had been telling me.  Next thing after that, in theory, is to
get the will probated and have "letters testamentary" in hand to authorize
any further changes on financials and other holdings.  Our original trust and
will/POA/etc lawyer is already on board to help shepherd me through the whole
process, and has said that some part of that can happen electronically as well.

Three things are inevitable: death, taxes, and store runs.  I headed out for
that latter item, fetching components to make my traditional Christmas Eve
dinner consisting of what we always called "Mommy's Mess".  This is a
very simple comfort-food recipe that supplies solid nutrition and ease of
ingesting, which our family had developed as a recurring thing over many years
of holiday seasons.  Before my Dad passed in early 2017, we even managed to
take a batch of this over to the nursing home he was in and have one final
dinner together with him in the way we always used to.  Two weeks later he
was gone, a process which Mom witnessed, but I was no longer present for.  She
was very noncomittal about that, as Dad was back in the hospital hooked up to
various machines; Mom just watched his vitals slow down and eventually just
stop.  So now I had just witnessed the same thing with Mom, sans the
electronics, and frankly that was a much more "human" experience.

I've thought about how anyone should deal with *my* remains when the time
comes, and semi-joked with folks "just drop the carcass in the nearest dumpster
and call it done".  But it's more complex than that from an administrative and
legal standpoint.  It was sort of ironic that a funeral home, which is normally
involved in the highly profitable business of wrapping high-priced ceremony
around the death process, would also be instrumental in this efficient flow
to deliver a body to a research facility that would view such incoming "meat"
in such an objective way.  But they're the places with refrigerated storage
and transport, so are contracted by Medcure for the handling process.  More
families should really look into this option, because the number of research
subject cadavers available in general is sadly less than would benefit aspiring
students of the medical practice.  With Mom, you will see how metastatic cancer
spread through her abdominal innards and took her life in a surprisingly short
amount of time.

The next practical step was to rip through Mom's purse and the wallet inside,
to pull out any contact information that may have held, along with her now
ineffectual driver license which I'd still need to take to the DMV to inform
them that this subscriber had passed away, etc.  She hadn't driven since we
sold off the car in 2022, but it's still her official state-issued ID.  It's
sitting here prominently on the desk I'm using while here, but will likely
wait until death-certificates are in hand to act upon.  Again, this is a weird
state to be in: the primary subject of XYZ has passed, but we're not telling
any of those contractual entities about it yet until we have the necessary
paperwork in hand to make any of these transitions official.  Meanwhile, it's
extremely good that as a full co-trustee, I'm authorized to make any needed
interactions on the relevant accounts in the interim.  I still likely need to
file an SS-4 with the Social Security administration, to make sure that they
stop sending the monthly checks, as well as the pension agency still acting
on my Dad's behalf.  Seriously, folks, *be* the "planners from hell" and get
all that paperwork in order well in advance.

As the news of Mom's passing fanned out through various social connections,
I started getting quite a few sympathetic and supportive thoughts from people
who understood what I was going through.  All of those are greatly appreciated,
and see previous thoughts on "contributions" and responses to this running
diary -- nobody has to go out of their way other than to read these updates
and whatever appears on "bgw.works" as I get time to provision more of its
memorial content.  My next step is to continue organizing the house contents
into a displayable format, so that I can ask a small circle of Mom's local
acquaintances to swing by and take whatever they might want.  Then, whatever's
left will go to Goodwill (who are fairly selective about what they'll accept)
or Habitat and ultimately, some kind of house-emptying service that holds no
bones about what they simply send to the landfill.  That just feels so
wasteful, but as modern humans we already have too much *stuff* so maybe
that's the best plan for its disposal.  So I *might* be done and out of
here before my next USPS mail-hold expires in mid-January, but we'll see
how it all goes.