"...it's not the training to be mean but the training to be kind that is used to keep us leashed best." ~ Black Dog Red

"In case you haven't recognized the trend: it proceeds action, dissent, speech." ~ davidly, on how wars get done

"...What sort of meager, unerotic existence must a man live to find himself moved to such ecstatic heights by the mundane sniping of a congressional budget fight. The fate of human existence does not hang in the balance. The gods are not arrayed on either side. Poseiden, earth-shaker, has regrettably set his sights on the poor fishermen of northern Japan and not on Washington, D.C. where his ire might do some good--I can think of no better spot for a little wetland reclamation project, if you know what I mean. The fight is neither revolution nor apocalypse; it is hardly even a fight. A lot of apparatchiks are moving a lot of phony numbers with more zeros than a century of soccer scores around, weaving a brittle chrysalis around a gross worm that, some time hence, will emerge, untransformed, still a worm." ~ IOZ

Jun 19, 2012

Sitting Vigil

My wife's mother has lived a life worth living. This must be written, repeated and said again. A generous, patient, wonderful woman, who transformed a life always on the edge of poverty into three daughters and a son who adore their mother.

That her children have had to sit vigil and watch her die slowly, over the past three days, because some god-sots think it's the penultimate evil to ease her impending death with a little extra chemistry - I cannot wrap my head around this. There is the cruelty of the torturing-small-animals variety, and then there is the methodical, institutional, traditional malice of the enforced vision of correct humanity. I'd rather deal with the cat killers than with the moralizing didacts in control of vast systems. You can always punch the budding lone sociopath in his motherfucking face.

How in all the unchrists do you negotiate with a sanctimonious, callous culture?

The "culture of life" is anything but, those overripe and self-righteous prick motherfuckers. Sure, they may not be as breezily hypocritical as Obamaphiliac liberals, or as comfortably compartmentalized as the Clinton fans who've embraced a spectacularly academic cognitive dissonance as their operational norm - but, right now I don't fucking care.

Watching my wife watch her mother die slowly, gasping for breath, with an inhumanely small dose of dilaudid seeping into her from the skin patch is fucking unbearable. It's wrong.

And it cannot stand.

14 comments:

Devin Lenda said...

Shit.

Two paradigms: 1. pain v. pleasure; 2. pleasing authority

...only the desire to please authority can convince people it's best to make others suffer. It takes some kind of transcendent principle to do that trick. God got Abraham to (almost) kill his son.

(Wise) doctors want to die painlessly:
http://zocalopublicsquare.org/thepublicsquare/2011/11/30/how-doctors-die/read/nexus/

Happy Jack said...

It's only been within the past four years that I finally understood the popularity of Kervorkian. I know what she is going through two times over.

Will Shetterly said...

Man, I so hear you.

The only thing you can do is to keep telling the doctors she's in pain and she needs more pain relief. If someone has her medical power of authority, they can seriously push for this if you have a sympathetic doctor.

Sorry you're going through this.

Richard said...

My mother was very clear about her wishes, and went into a hospice facility after her diagnosis, where she lived for another 6 weeks. The only interventions were for the purpose of comfort. Didn't really make it that much easier except that she was able to control what happened to her.

High Arka said...

/hug

Don't do anything that gets you in trouble.

The evil plan is to eventually trap us all in that state, working forever in noble rot, unable to escape the prison of our "own" bodies, and gradually, selves. You're seeing the horrible early stages of that.

You may be pleased to discover yourself in agreement with this one re: On Age and Evil.

Justin said...

Jack, that sucks. I hope you are all taking the experience as well as can be expected.

As to the spirit of the post, I agree. Its been something percolating for quite awhile, this macabre fixation in our culture with squeezing every God forsaken drop out of this life, no matter how much it hurts. I could hardly think up a sicker manifestation of the desire to own and control others than to take away their right to choose how they die when their time comes.

From cradle to grave, circumcision to dying breath, they want you to know that your ass is theirs. You're right, this will not stand forever.

Philboyd Studge said...

If you believe the statistics, support for god-sots is sinking and support for euthanasia is rising. Hopefully the amount of pointless, inhuman suffering among those dying of old age will sink as well.

What gets me is the staggering pride of these people, to assume that their anti-euthanasia position is the default - not just for them, but for everybody.

d.mantis said...

Philboyd,
You must be 'getting' alot then. Euthanasia, abortion, war, the police state, justice...its all one big FUCK YOU to everyone not of the elite.

Lack of accountablility is the syringe pushing the greatest evil. And yeah, this cannot stand forever.

d.mantis said...

I wish you and your family all the best.

Will's advice is good. In addition, if she is in a PCU or ICU, talk to the nurses. My wife is a critical care nurse and they have a pretty good amount of leeway as to medication allocation.

Jack Crow said...

Thanks, all.

My wife's mother died the middle of last week, surrounded by her husband and children.

She died peacefully in her sleep, taking one last breath before she let go forever, more than a decade after the nearly fatal head trauma which robbed her of speech, autonomy - and at the end, awareness.

Four days was too long to watch her die, but in some ways, it allowed her children to make their peace with her life, her death and each other, and I think my wife now sees this as the final gift from her beloved mother.

I know it's probably trite to write it out - but death is fucking hard, no matter how many times a day it happens to strangers. You'd think that an event which has occurred literally billions of times just within recorded human history would at some point become commonplace within the matrix of human memory; it is anything but.

High Arka said...

~dreaming~

d.mantis said...

Glad to hear she atleast passed away surrounded by loving family. I would count it as damn lucky to go out that way.

Also, the immediacy of death is strange. When my wife first became a critical care nurse, she took the first couple of deaths really hard. She was amazed by the callousness that institutionalized healthcare showed.

After talking about it at length, it seems the nature of institutions in general. Nobody's fault, no one is to blame, etc., etc...I mean, thats how they get us to "support the troops" while killing-by-flying-death-robots right?

Anonymous said...

"Euthanasia, abortion, war, the police state, justice...its all one big FUCK YOU to everyone not of the elite."

One of these things is not like the other. One of these things...

High Arka said...

(Hey Jack, cited you in Domesticated.)