My uncle died in hospice today. Everyone says "It's a blessing" and I suppose it is; he was 84 and undergoing a rapid decline that his doctor eventually described as "all of his major systems just shutting down." And I certainly didn't want to see him suffer any more than necessary, or experience any more indignities than he already had.
But he and I both went through chemo, and there's a sort of odd fraternal brotherhood of chemo sufferers. I'm sad he's dead, of course, but more than that, I feel a great sense of pity that he suffered through chemo for nothing. Would he have been better off from a quality-of-life point of view if he'd never undergone chemo, especially since he had chronic lymphoid leukemia, which is generally considered incurable? I don't know. It's not for me to say.
Francis Donald Hamman, 1925 - 2009. In Pace Requiescat.
Is That All?
11 years ago
5 comments:
I'm sorry to hear this, William. My sincere sympathy to you.
Thank you. I always sort of hate it when people say "It was a blessing," but it really was.
I hate that too. It's impossible to know what the situation was and how the person passing felt about it. I just lost my dad three weeks ago and I'm still sort of a mess. It happened very suddenly and I have no idea how he would have felt about the way it happened.
I'm sorry to hear that! Losing a parent is hard no matter how it happens. My dad went pretty suddenly too - he went in for what was supposed to be routine surgery, and within a couple of days he was dead. Makes you want to shake someone and shout "WHY?"
But what can you do?
Only a slight difference here--he went in for emergency surgery to repair something he should have had fixed about 10 years ago, and never woke up. With a couple of weeks perspective, I think that was probably better for him than a long, drawn-out alternative, but it still sucks.
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