UPDATE

 No, this isn't a "bulletin bulletin bulletin".  What is these days?

by Claudia Soraya on Unsplash

 Nope.  

These are some notes written just after a wake and bake about what's been happening, home wise, ya dig?

So.  We are "on hospice."  I have trouble saying, "he is on hospice" as I feel that I am the one who needs them, not him.  I need to have people on my side when the really hard part starts (the part requiring nursing and lifting and the bedside commode and the hospital bed, etc.).  Fuck.

Fuckity fuckity fuck!!!!

I'm not built to be able to show a "brave face" and somehow "hospice" hit me, or I let it hit me, in ways that knowing about his approaching death has hit me a few times before, and I wind up pushing it back but only when I've flung drops of my grief like pitch onto friends and passing strangers.

I have so many projects to finish and I feel distracted and like I can't finish any of them.

I've been here before.  I can dig myself out.

Stoner stream of consciousness.

I walked around our funky classic 90s building in the dark early this morning on first arrival.  I saw a dude working downstairs and didn't want to freak him out by walking past him outside in the light, so I just looked at him and then out at the river and felt the cool breeze against my skin.  Cold breeze.  I think it was 31 degrees F.  As I stood there, a few lines of a someday poem came into my head.

I peak around the corner,
waiting for death as I
once waited for a lover
(plural that over time
times rage and hunger)
it's ETA now evidenced
to governmental gate -
keepers.....

And that's as far as I got!

But to continue with the update.....

He weighs 131 pounds on what was once a 6'2" frame with really big bones.

He doesn't eat very much.  I make sure he has protein snacks at various times to try and keep him more stable on his feet.  Heart and Home got us a walker but he hasn't chosen to use it yet.  I've gotten rid of all the rugs in the house except the old Afghani carpet in my old study (which I don't use anymore because he likes to be around me, I think?  He appreciates my presence.

He is generally content when he is awake, though reading very little, at least when I am in his vicinity.  Does he read when I'm not around?  I don't know.  I sometimes see him sitting in a chair looking at a book when I'm doing yard work outside the front window.

When nurse Kim came on Monday (Kimday, EFMday), she took his blood pressure and (drum roll please) it was pretty much the same as it was when he was taking the lisinopril!  (We -- Dr. Thakur, Nurse Kim, and moi -- have taken him off all life-sustaining medication.)  I keep thinking of General Westmoreland purportedly saying, "The beginning of the end is beginning to come into sight."