Member-only story
Have You Ever Been at the Deathbed?
Sometimes just being there is enough
I had been dozing in a chair next to the couch where my sister was dying, at home, surrounded by her dogs. Five tiny Chihuahuas were curled up with her, around her legs and on her shoulder. She hadn’t spoken for several hours now. It was day four.
She was actively dying from tracheal cancer at age sixty-four. As the big sister by two years, always the practical one, I had received her text five days earlier from Arizona. She said she couldn’t breathe and was sitting on the kitchen floor awaiting death or the ambulance. She couldn’t even talk, thus the texts.
I made the first plane I could out of Omaha (damn, it was Easter weekend pre-COVID and flights were full) and anxiously made it to her bedside a day later in the transitional hospice facility the hospital’s ER had sent her to once they stabilized her condition. She feared she would die of suffocation. The kind hospice doctor in the Hawaiian shirt said he’d make sure that didn’t happen.
We opted for hospice at home, and the next day we set up shop in her little bungalow, armed with morphine, sedatives, a terribly loud oxygen machine, a bottle of Chevas, and a refrigerator magnet with a hospice’s phone number to call if I had questions.
