Koroner’s Korner:coming Home

My last two articles were entitled, ‘Living and Dying with Cancer’ and ‘Successful Dying’.  This article is entitled Coming Home for two reasons.  One, because we are truly home now and don’t have to drive or fly thousands of miles home to attend funerals and two; because being home puts a whole new face on the dying process.

When you are a thousand miles away and you get a call or email about a death in the family, you really are only coming home for the end process.  That of the collective grieving and the start of mourning.  But the funeral and burial are only small parts of the dying process.  Especially if the death is the result of a long bout with cancer, Multiple Sclerosis (MS) or some other debilitating disease.  And that goes double for those afflicted by Alzheimer’s or those with other, ongoing diseases that cause dementia.

For those families who have to suffer through the long-term and sometimes ever-declining physical and mental health of a loved one, the death of a loved one is almost a relief from the pain and agony they have been feeling for years.  As the country and western song says, “Lord, I want to go to heaven, but I don’t want to go tonight.”  The physical and mental torture the family endures becomes an integral part of the dying process.  While many folks feel sorry for the afflicted, few understand the pain of the seemingly eternal process for the family when the dying process stretches over months and years.

My dad’s brother Paul was a hard-working man his entire life; no fat on his bones.  But after a heart attack and the onset of Congestive Heart Failure, the inability for his heart to fully pump all the fluids efficiently, he began to slowly ‘bloat up’ as the fluid backed up, into his lungs and all over his body.  He was easily winded and almost confined to a chair because exertion fatigued him so badly.  My dad used to visit him often as they were very close, both as a family and as business partners in the 1950’s when Leo first took the Standard station on Highway 54.  As his brother slowly declined, it affected my dad so much to see the change, that he stopped visiting nearly as regularly until it was rare that he visited.

I was speaking with a friend today and he told me of a forty-something year old woman whose dad was in such declining health, she couldn’t stand to go visit him and see how much he had changed and how much he was suffering.  So now, in my opinion, that poor woman is living on a razor’s edge.  On one side of the razor is her sadness at seeing the decline and change of her father, and on the other side is the extreme guilt she must feel for not going to visit her dying father.  So, she lives her life on the edge of Occam’s Razor.  The simplest solution to go see her father, but also so painful she can’t bring herself to it.

Another close friend told me she hates to go see her mother because her mother’s mental health has gotten to the point where she is abusive to everybody, even to her own daughter, and has run off all the caretakers assigned to her.  Her mother was diagnosed with MS when only nineteen years old.  So, my friend has lived her whole life watching her mother slowly degrade over almost fifty years.  My friend is the now the only one who’s love allows her to tolerate her mother’s abuse as she goes daily to the care facility to change her mother’s dressings. 

So, when I say “Coming Home”, it’s more than just coming back to the area my ancestors settled over a hundred and fifty years ago.  It’s coming home to not just the funerals, but to the whole dying process.  That was underlined just this last week as my wife took her mother to visit a dying aunt.  Alzheimer’s has been slowly setting in and she initially accused her sister (my mother-in-law) of just pretending to be her sister.  It took days of talking about their childhood and reminiscing over old photos before her sister finally came to understand that my mother-in-law really was family. 

I’m afraid that after the short, several weeks of constant stimulation, she will regress back into her dementia and forget everything; leaving her husband to continue to fight each day, supporting her with his love, yet seeing her slowly, constantly, painfully and inevitably step ever-closer to her final relief.  But it has been a blessing for all concerned that they were given some time at the end to relive their lives with each other.  Not everyone gets that chance.

For us, Coming Home meant not just coming home to family and friends, but also coming home to the dying process, instead of just coming home at the end.  I beg each of you to live your life to its fullest and love your neighbor by helping them to embrace the challenges they face in both living and dying.  As Pastor Brent says, “For some of you, you will be the closest thing ever that some folks will get to opening a Bible.”

Danny Leo Green

Cedar County Coroner