Bring Out Your Dead

 

Wilbur Kenneth Huck was pronounced dead by on-call hospice nurse Flora at 3:45 p.m. Sunday, December 26, Boxing Day, St. Stephen's Day.

Bereft of life, he is no more.  He has gone to sing with the choir invisible and shall soon be pushing up the daisies in the Pilot Butte Cemetery and sometime in the fall a bronze representation of Birdy will watch over him through time and eternity or someone in the Mad Max future pillages the graveyard and melts down her sculpture into canon balls.

OK.  If I gave a fuck about SEO as I did for the two long years I wasn't able to run my funeral/wedding celebrant business well enough, I'd be expecting an  editorial comment about how the preceding sentence was too long but in argument I must say I was profoundly influenced by the book All the King's Men when I was in high school and emulated the paragraph-long sentences of Robert Penn Warren.  And of course (right arm flourishing upward) Shakespeare!  and Dickens, in the form of memorized passages of A Christmas Carol.  What I mean is, I had long, complex sentences in my head long before I wrote Sentenced to Venice.

Even as my friends surrounded me with loved during the last couple of weeks it was wretchedly hard dealing with the piss and shit and sadness about same and cleaning and loving him and hating the process and being really fucking mad at God for putting as both through this kind of ending.  

And Heart and Home Hospice failed me at the end.  It's nobody's fault.  Everybody did the best they could but it wasn't good enough.  The week before Will died our CNA caregiver and I both knew he was dying.  I had been promised by Nurse Karen (who left Heart and Home for a better paying job) that she would be able to accurately predict approaching death and I'd have someone coming by every day.  Nurse X. was telling me, "Oh, I'll come by twice next week."  This the last week of his life.  How come Jen and I knew and Nurse X didn't.  I feel some crankiness with her, although she was very professional and caring during her visits.  However, I asked her to find me a volunteer and she said, 'After the Holidays - hard to find somebody now.'  I assume she had to follow certain protocols and was doing the best she could.  I felt caring from all individual hospice people but I cannot recommend the business.  Their protocols or Nurse X's interpretation of them gave me insufficient support during Will's final week.  They never gave me "the booklet" about the end of life -- no one offered it to me.  People seemed to expect me to know what to do.  One nurse seemed surprised I'd never changed a diaper.  Basically, I felt abandoned and neglected, even though Nurse X wrote a text to me saying "If we are to a point of daily visits then we will be there for you daily."  My whole experience with them speaks to me of corporate bullshittery -- the people hired seem caring but overworked and underpaid and the protocols left me desperate and gasping my last week.  Why?  Plus nobody from Hospice took the time to explain, orally, how to use the medications until after I started having trouble with him fighting me while I tried to change and clean him.  I never got their death booklet.  "What to do until the reaper comes."

December 16:  Hospital bed moves in.  Pastor Noah Heinrich is there to visit with Will and also support me in a time of transition. 

Nurse X visits.  I ask about getting a volunteer to visit me.  She says that she will ask about it.  DOES NOT GET BACK TO ME ON THIS ISSUE EVEN AFTER WILL DIES.  DOES NOT SAY SHE IS SORRY.  Not that I'm pissed off or anything.

 He helps me bring up the pad from the couch downstairs. I covered that with sheets and blankets.  During the night I would wake when I heard the metal on the hospital bed to find he'd uncovered his long, bare legs and seemed to be trying to get out of bed.  I would ask him what he wanted and he wouldn't know and he'd lie down again. 

December 17:  At 5:34 in the morning after an extremely restless night, I posted a call for help on Facebook.  I knew we were in the very last phase and knew I couldn't get through it by myself OR with the support of a Hospice that seemed to be abandoning me.

I FB posted that the phase Will and I were entering, with me sleeping on the floor beside his hospital bed, was much harder than I thought it would be.  Friends come through with food, dairy-free ice cream, visits, phone calls.  Awesome group, the people I know, now that I know how to know people who are awesome rather than people who abandon at the slightest sign of discomfort. 

December 18:  He has a shitstorm in bed.  After working with him for a half hour I finally contact Nurse X who contacts the oncall who contacts me.  SHE is absolutely wondeful, Nurse Keyara.  I yelled at her about lack of support and she calmed me down by doing proper listening techniques ("I understand what you're saying") and I apologized to her.  

 I got friend visits and food and fed my relationship with weed so freely I stopped getting high.

What I didn't get was a call or Facebook message from my pastor!  And I got hit with rage spurt and I made a decision to use a communication method I dislike but one which seemed appropriate in the given situation.  I triangulated (which probably turned into a quadrangle or quintangle) my rage, telling someone else about it (and using all my Irish fucks which I give freely).  I didn't receive any message from him before I went to bed.

I exchange the couch pad for the mattress on the single bed I bought from Target. 

I text Pastor Noah repeatedly but it isn't until late that night that he is able to respond, having been out of cell phone range.

December 19, Sunday:  He makes it to the bathroom with me holding on to him, holding steady his 113 lbs.  He is dying and he is insisting on getting to the bathroom, I'm sure because it is less trouble for me.  More friends visit.  My pastor calls and apologizes.  I forgive him and accept his apology while noting that it did happen that I felt abandoned by him.  From that point on he calls every couple of days.  Unfortunately, he tends to use his Digby O'Dell voice and I want to say "talk normal" which I will if he continues to use it.

December 20th:  Will sleeps almost all day.  Visit from Nurse X.  She tells me she'll come twice next day.  Why do I know he's dying when she doesn't?  I have a partial night away from the house but it's snowing so heavily that I head back after a nice dinner.

I contact Holly Pruet, a Funeral Celebrant I've met and hire her to create a Eulogy for Will. 

Fucking reSupply doesn't show up to move the marital bed.  I engage in some explosive messaging (that anger still finding targets) and the next day I hire College Hunks Moving Junk.  Yay -- quick, profesional, showing up when they said on Thursday.

December 21 Tuesday:  Jen calls in sick.  She will not be able to come back to work until Friday morning.

The new Nurse's aide, Rachel, comes to change and bathe him and he lets her because she's awesome instead of scary, like the Tuesday Dec. 14 cna.

Pastor Noah comes for his final visit.  He has a great talk with Will during which Will says that he is ready to die, that he know that he is dying, that he is ready to go to heaven. The wonderful Pastor Noah is talking about Paradise and an end to pain and I ask Will if he wants to go be with Birdy and June Jhumpa and he says "yes."  I tell him I love him and he says he loves me.

And I want to say God Bless Pastor Noah.  We have very different Christian theologies, but we both believe in doing the work and he does the work.

 December 22, Wednesday:  

I am on a zoom call with Holly Pruet when thin almost-a-ghost Will Huck appears confused at the door of the bedroom, having climbed over or through the rails of the hospital bed. 

At 4:00 in the afternoon I am blessed by a visit from the Trinity Episcopal choir.

December 23:  another visit from Nurse X who blithely says, "We'll see you for two visits next week."

December 24:  Jen is able to give me three hours so I run an errand downtown and then return early because of the snow.  I watch some of the evening service but am not feeling all that much like welcoming that baby who was probably born in spring anyway.

December 25:  I call the hospice because I've let him go too long without changing.  The lovely oncall person arrives and we change him and he fights us.  I fear the last thing my spouse said to me was "no no go away" while pushing me with his hands.  I assume he suffered a cluster of more strokes at this point in time.  Once he and the bed were clean, he didn't change position until he couldn't.

I spent the day putting all his remaining clothing (except a couple of pieces I will keep and a couple give away).

December 26:  Boxing Day, St. Stephen's Day.  

When I woke up I saw he was in the same position.  I took his hand and noticed his fingertips were blue.  He had a fever of 101.  I'd been giving him morphine with aloprazolam for about 36 hours after a nurse finally told me I could do that (oh, my...I could have used so much more information so much earlier).

 I called Hospice.  On-call Nurse Flora said she could come after she dealt with three other clients in LaPine.  

Jen gave me a few hours to have lunch on Sunday.  I went to Greg's Grill and had a steak.  I returned.  Jen left.  Hospice nurse Flora arrived and we cleaned him and she notice a fever of 103 and said he was dying as she sat there.  We changed places and she stood with her hand on his heart and I held his hand and watched his face as he died as I was telling his spirit or driver or whatever was left that I loved him.