It started when my late husband was hospitalized, precancer diagnosis. We both just knew something was horribly wrong. I noticed that initially confident doctors would begin hedging about what might be wrong and then would hand his case off to another set of doctors. It happened three times. By the time they finally told us that he had cancer of "the everything," we'd pretty much figured it out on our own. I felt panicked and trapped. I felt like there should have been something that I could do to make the cancer somehow go away. I read about it, spoke with multiple specialists, consulted herbalists, but there was nothing. I buckled down and strived to give him perfect support and to show unconditional love. The trapped feeling diminished. I felt that everything would be okay if I could just channel sufficient energy. After the diagnosis had finally been given, along with the prognosis for less than one year of life, my husband and I returned home with the best of the most powerful pain killers. It was fine for a couple of weeks. Then his condition took a sudden turn for the worse. He became unresponsive while I was in the middle of spoon feeding him ice chips. I knew that he wanted to die at home, but it was too soon. I panicked and called 911. The emergency room physician diagnosed dehydration and possible pneumonia. He said that if we were to do nothing, it would be over in a couple of hours. I could not simply tell them to do nothing, even though that was what my late husband had told me to do. Treatment was started. He improved well enough to be able to take a single walk up and down the hall of the hospital ward. I told myself that the key to keeping him alive was to keep him in the hospital. His oncologist was willing to indulge me. Each day, he thought up some new, completely unneeded test that had to be done in order to justify continued hospital stay. At one point, my late husband's internist chastized me for taking up a much needed hospital bed without legitimate medical reson. Then my late husband admitted that he was seeing ghosts, dead people. He said they at first were gray, shadowed human forms. But now, they were in color. They were different races and genders. He said the only way to tell the ghosts from the real people was that when the ghosts moved away, it was at super, inhuman speeds. I'd read about the "visions" in the hospice book and new they meant approaching death. One afternoon in the hospital, my late husband told me that a ghost that had spent the morning sitting near the window had come across to the hospital bed and gotten in his face. My late husband said that he did not recognize the man as friend or relation. He told me he did not want to die in a hospital full of ghosts. He insisted that I take him home. I didn't want him to die, especially not in the house. When I told him about my fear, he told me that I could wheel him onto the front porch when the time came, but that I had to let him die at home. By that point, I'd read many things claiming that death was merely a transition of body rather than the end of a soul. The hospice books were filled with stories of suffering people clinging to life and begging their loved ones to be taken home to die. I became convinced that the spirit lingers where it leaves the body, or maybe that its point of reentry to this world, for purposes of visitation, is the location from where it left. I didn't want to risk the stranding of his spirit in a hospital filled with unknown ghosts. All sorts of people have died there. I worried that some of them might be hostile. I decided that if there had to be a transition point, it should be where he wanted it to be. The decision gave me the strength and courage to bring him home where his spirit could be at peace. Two of his friends came to the hospital to gather his things and drive them home. I rode with my late husband in the ambulance. Before we left the hospital, he thanked the nursing staff for taking such good care of him and kept repeating that he felt like a kid at Christmas.
A coward dies a thousand times before his death. A brave man dies but once. ~William Shakespeare~
It's too bad, but I think that I am a bit of a coward.
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