Hospicetangential

December 1, 2002

Sunday, and he is in the hospital, having gone in a week ago Friday, in my new little Subaru. I spoke to him last just a week ago, precisely. He's been on morphine since Monday...

I don't know where best to begin. His family is transferring him to a hospice tomorrow. He was a lot sicker than he let on and hid it of course from everyone and some of us simply would not see. Call the house fire the starting point, after which his family shoved him to the sidelines, that and with what the kids mean to him, was more than enough to topple a house of cards. It did. Physically everything began breaking down notably: the eyes, the back, the heart, the hips, the back. He almost couldn't see on the golf course. He couldn't play alone. And it was a miserable hot summer. The family dinners virtually disappeared. The organization was spiralling down so fast no one could control it. He stopped walking, could barely walk. He stopped carrying things, he couldn't. He would not tell the doctors he saw about the other problems he had. He would not stop the smoking. He drank more and more vodka, far too much -- to cloak the pain. And who was there? Me, period, me who he barely wanted in the first place. It's cancer, in his lumbar and cervix. And pneumonia. They don't know the origin. He's too weak for testing. It barely matters. It doesn't matter.