On my way to visit with my elderly mother - really elderly....Not too many people reach the age of 99 and there are indications that she will be with us for her 100th on Feb 1st 2008. As I wait for my flight to Victoria, my thoughts are on the fragility of life. How many of us can expect to reach such an age? As I sit here at age 68, waiting to get on the waiting list for a new hip, I wonder which set of genes are forefront in my body - my father's, who died at age 78 with totally closed arteries? Or my mother's, who has the same scottish bloodlines as the late Queen Mother? Hopefully the latter - Dad was on medication for high blood pressure at age 40+, but I do have the same relatively low bp that mother has always had. Interesting the psychology here...mother is very tired, would like to go, but her heart is really too strong to stop. It is the peripherals that are letting her down - eyesight starting to fail, various functions gradually shutting down. So I wonder about how fragile life really is? We can walk into the path of a bus while totally healthy, or we can hang on with everything failing....
Which do you wish for? Having volunteered in a long care facility, and having taken my choir to sing in such places, the last thing I want to be is one of them. But when the time really comes, I suspect that my body and mind are going to fight to stay on. When you read on obit that says "she (he) passed on peacefully with her (his) family around. Does anyone really go peacefully into that good night?
2 comments:
Who knows - maybe. I quite like the way Liz went - peacefully in hospital with her sons holding her hands...
I hope that we all get to live the life that we dreamed. It's the process of dying that robs us of independence and dignity. I always think of what it must be like to die doing the things that I do all the time...driving, flying, running.
I have no way of predicting how I will die or the way in which my emotions will take me, but suffice it to say: I would like to die thinking that I'm going to live forever: eg. suddenly. Dying while KNOWING that your death is imminent is where all the anguish, terror and loneliness must occur. The thing about dying that makes my heart lurch thinking that, as I die, I know all my friends and loved ones are still alive, enjoying life and missing me. If they were all gone, perhaps, as the cliche goes, there'd be nothing left to live for.
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