as he lay dying

Sometimes I get too involved. Sometimes I care about the living as well as the dying. I am always interested in the deathbed experience, and it is difficult to talk about it here, here in cyberpublic. But I love this old woman and her husband was dying and she wanted to be alone with him and she, like most, has some kids. And some of them are, shall we say, a little Ozarkian? A daughter with under-developed social antennae and two grown sons, both of them meth cooks if I do say so myself and I do. So the good daugher asks me, as the ruler of the Alzheimer's Universe, to make the cast of Deliverance go home, or at least back under their rock. What a pure waste of subtlety. I couldn't really just tell them to get the fuck out of there. And the old woman couldn't do it herself. So, I guess I did it. You can tell when somebody is there for support, and when they are doing deathbed time to earn something. You can smell it.

The first time I met her she was wheeling down the hall with an irridescent blue hydrangea in her hand. I commented on it and she told me, with tears in her eyes, that it was hers. She had grown it, and they had moved from that home into Assisted Living and she couldn't stand it and she had driven her car back to their house to pick a flower. "I don't know how you women do it," I said. "I really don't. I couldn't." Leave my house? My garden? My stuff? Are you kidding?

So, I helped her husband on his way to heaven. She'll be right behind him, I got a feelin'.