ROOM 209

The sun was shining and the November afternoon was balmy. I hoped that she could feel the breeze and sunlight, breathe the scent of fallen leaves and fresh air one last time before she entered the facility. Through a maze of wheelchairs holding slumped, white-haired regulars, I walked behind her, noting the number of the room she was wheeled into at the end of the hall.

Room 209.  It has a bed, a chair and a window; a simple room for a simple woman.

Room 209.  It is the room where my aunt will live her final days.

Her final months have been a blur of hospital gurneys and rehab, MRIs and  CT Scans, intravenous drips and drugs. My aunt is 89 years old. She has dementia.  Her decline has been fast, and my sweet, simple aunt is sometimes furious. Why do we keep asking her the same questions: "Who are you? Where are you?" Why don't we listen when she pleads, "I want to go home!" 

Does she know she is dying? Alert one moment, catatonic the next, my aunt exists at her own pace: refusing to eat or drink, then laboring to swallow a teaspoon of pureed pork chop, or sip water from a straw. My mom, my sisters and I hover: talk, sing, pray with her. Nurses and aides, gifted with the patience, kindness, and gentle touch reserved for saints, treat her like a treasured family member. Still, my aunt mouths these words from parched, swollen lips: "I am so lonely."

Widowed long ago and never a parent, my aunt spent years living alone. In Room 209, caregivers hover day and night. I don't understand. How can she feel lonely?

Mom understands. "We all die alone," she says. 

Few words can describe what it's like to watch a person's descent into death. I have seen babies die, watched children and adults suffer through the final stages of tragic illness, held the hands of people I never met as they died waiting for the jaws-of-life to arrive and cut through their mangled car. 

In these final days of my aunt's life, I don't feel the same sense of hopelessness, outrage, injustice or grief that I previously experienced as a witness to death. I wish that our elderly loved ones didn't have to suffer through a multitude of medical procedures that only prolong the inevitable. I am in awe of caregivers in skilled nursing facilities who see their work as a calling, rather than a job. I am humbled that a woman I remember as being once my age is nearing the end of her life.

Beside its bed, chair and window, Room 209 now houses the presence of death. Futilely attempting to spoon feed and comfort my godmother-like I once did my toddlers-I can't help but think that life is not really a circle. It's more like a cross-country trip. Miles as years, we travel with a few favorite companions from town to city, over mountains and valleys, across prairies and plains that seem to go on forever. Along the way, we stop and meet the locals- making connections that enrich our lives; we take snapshots of the vistas we've seen, and the faces we never want to forget. 

My aunt is nearing the end of her road trip. A simple, devout woman, she has journeyed beneath clouds, through rain, snow, and storms aplenty.  But she always believed that beyond her view, a sunlit sky would fade into a night blazing with stars- and there would be the promise of a new day to come, eternally. 

   

Godspeed, my dear Aunt.