I am sorry to hear about your loss Babs :My prayers for your loved ones.


Edited to remove off-topic content.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: DorianGreyed,

Thank you all, you brought true comfort to me. It's just amazing to me how the net can bring people together across many miles, instantly, and yet allow words of caring and fellow-feeling to convey emotions as old as mankind.

My daughter and her husband have been here since the morning after Ernie died. We shared memories of Ern as we worked, hard, to convert a house which had been essentially converted to a sick room back into a home. They brought their big pickup truck, and so we donated the hospital bed to the Home Care unit, returned the wheelchair and other items we had borrowed from the Red Cross, and returned unused meds to the pharmacy and the oncology unit for disposal.

I'm now in the process of simplifying, simplifying, giving away useful things and discarding those no one would likely want.

My favorite story from Ernie's last days: I was pleading with him to take just a little water. He had been in and out of consciousness and I had no idea if he understood me. Then I saw a flash of humor in his eyes, and he said, 'Kitten'.

I was astonished. I said, "Do you mean that if I bring you the kitten, you will drink some water?" And he nodded very slightly. I brought the kitten and put it beside his hand. He moved his hand slightly to cover the kitten's tiny body, and when I offered the water, he took a few sips. That was, as the kids say, way cool.

I am pleased to see you for a minute, and glad you have family there to share those memories- The kitten moment is going to stay with me a long while, thanks for sharing it.

My email is in my profile and if there's anything I can offer, please don't hesitate.
Lots of love
Shana

That's the least I can do, considering the thoughtful and VERY HELPFUL posts I have had, phone calls and e-mails I have had. I will try to give everyone the courtesy each deserves but things are pretty hectic right now, in one way, paperwork, calls, etc. So just a check-in call to once again say how your kindness has truly made a difference.

Oh Babs....I am so sorry for your loss...I haven't been in AP for a few and just saw this...I will keep you and your family in my heart and in my thoughts...If there is anything I can do please e-mail me...my addy is in my profile.

My sincere condolences, Babs...you're in my thoughts and prayers..

Thank you for your kind thoughts. I got a beautiful sympathy card today from one of you. I loved the message

quote:

May you find comfort in memories.

The gift of time we cherish,
The gift of life goes fast.
The gift of love will never end
As long as memories last.

May the remembrance of a life you cherished fill all your days with love.

Thank you my friend. Thank all of you.

Audrey told me of the news just the other day. I am sorry for your loss but also glad that he is no longer in pain and that you now have the freedom to take some quality time for yourself. You are in my thoughts.

Bab, I realize we have had differences, but there is nothing different about loss in your family. I was not ok with the death of my 93 year old grandmother. Nothing can make me see her death as anything but a loss to my family. I am sure you see it as the same, loss and it hurts bad.

My prayers are with you and your family. When you love someone, it hurts deeply. I understand your pain. I am so sorry this happened to you and your family.

Humans tend to take things for granted. We always know somewhere in the back of our minds that we will die. However we tend to play a trick on ourselves, we pretend that Self will continue that Self is immune to death.

This allows the majority to pursue their lives any way with few regrets with few extra steps to make every moment count. Some of us behave nicely, others... many of us behave not so nicely taking for granted that tomorrow will come for us and that the days and months will string together to an infinity of time.

For us middle aged people we think back to how badly we spent out youth, we thought back that that we would remain in our twenties for ever, when we reach our forties we are more keenly aware of the passage of time and how we are misspending that time. When we are confronted with a shortening of our days we are even more keenly aware of just how we spend each moment.

Time is a currency that we can spend any way we want. When we have little of that currency left we tend to spend it wisely, getting the most "bang for the buck" as we can.

It is a shock to the system to hear or learn that for self the days are numbered, that instead of an infinite period of time we have a finite period in order to live our whole lives. The steps of grief usually come much faster when we are dealing with our own end than with the end of another. We know inside the truth of our end, we know on a level that goes beyond knowing when someone else is about to shuffle of this mortal coil.

Everything, including the pains and misery become precious delights that are savored because we know that soon we will not be experiencing those aspects of life. And as Will Shakespeare poetically stated we have no idea of what comes when we shuffle off this mortal coil - we can assume that everything we know will be lost to us. There is a certain dread of that undiscovered country we do not know what is there. We are comfortable with life, we understand it and everything that makes up life. Everything about life becomes special and there is a strong desire to make it as nice as possible so we have more good moments to savor than bad.

For those of us who live from paycheck to paycheck we can relate to it a little better when we consider that toward the end of the pay period we tend to be short on cash and we tend to make it go as far as possible, each cent we spend we try to spend wisely. So it is with life and the time we have.

Serenity comes when we accept the things we can not change. Death is the Ultimate thing we can not change so naturally there comes the Ultimate Serenity.

There is actually a sort of relief that takes place when we know that we have X amount of time left. We can take the time to put what energy we have left into the lives of those who will remain after we have gone. Living requires a lot of selfishness, we always have to be concerned for our own needs before the needs of others. Once we understand that our needs are limited, we can focus on the needs of those around us. Things become simpler, plans become easier all of a sudden we are able to focus our attentions elsewhere.

And life being a precious commodity to those who have it in limited supply becomes more endearing and more precious and worth our treading through it carefully and with a supernatural kindness because we understand just how miraculous it really is.

I'd like to offer, on the subject of grief, an inspiring excerpt from a book I'm currently reading: I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter, Basic Books 2007 (amazon.com).

Chapter 1
On Souls and Their Sizes
Soul-Shards (pp. 9-10)

quote:

One gloomy day in early 1991, a couple of months after my father died, I was standing in the kitchen of my parents' house, and my mother, looking at a sweet and touching photograph of my father taken perhaps fifteen years earlier, said to me, with a note of despair, "What meaning does that photograph have? None at all. It's just a flat piece of paper with dark spots on its here and there. It's useless." The bleakness of my mother's grief-drenched remark set my head spinning because I knew instinctively that I disagreed with her, but I did not quite know how to express to her the way I felt the photograph should be considered.

After a few minutes of emotional pondering -- soul-searching, quite literally -- I hit upon an analogy that I felt could convey to my mother my point of view, and which I hoped might lend her at least a tiny degree of consolation. What I said to her was long the following lines.

"In the living room we have a book of the Chopin études for piano. All of its pages are just pieces of paper with dark marks on the, just as two-dimensional and flat and foldable as the photograph of Dad -- and yet, think of the powerful effect that they have had on people all over the world for 150 years now. Thanks to those black marks on those flat sheets of paper, untold thousands of people have collectively spent millions of hours moving their fingers over the keyboards of pianos in complicated patterns, producing sounds that give them indescribable pleasure and a sense of great meaning. Those pianists in turn have conveyed to many millions of listeners, including you and me, the profound emotions that churned in Frédéric Chopin's heart, thus affording all of us some partial access to Chopin's interiority -- to the experience of living in the head, or rather the soul, of Frédéric Chopin. The marks on those sheets of paper are no less than soul-shards -- scattered remnants of the shattered soul of Frédéric Chopin. Each of those strange geometries of notes has a unique power to bring back to life, inside our brains, some tiny fragment of the internal experiences of another human being, and many people feel intense love for him. In just as potent a fashion, looking at that photograph of Dad brings back, to us who knew him intimately, the clearest memory of his smile and his gentleness, activates inside our living brain some of the most central representations of him that survive in us, makes little fragments of his soul dance again, but in the medium of brains other than his own. Like the score to a Chopin étude, that photograph is a soul-shard of someone departed, and it is something we should cherish as long as we live."

Although the above is a bit more flowery than what I said to my mother, it gives the essence of my message. I don't know what effect it had on her feelings about the picture, but that photo is still there, on a counter in her kitchen, and every time I look at it, I remember that exchange.

Exactly so. All perception can be reduced to neuron firings: electro-chemical events. In moments of sorrow or bitterness we can dismiss all of human experience as meaningless. But the experiences of life have their own reality in their own framework. Over-intellectualization is a form of self-indulgence. The experience is raw and real, and cannot be denied or reduced.

The Canadian poet Irving Layton saw white paper birch trees, leafless in autumn, and said, "... the flame of life passed through them without their ever having heard of Jesus or Marx."