my mother in law has died

My mother in law, Marjorie Marx, has died. She had pancreatic cancer which, despite dire predictions that once diagnosed, she had only months to live, instead lasted nearly three more years before the disease finally got her. Even so, it took her a long time to die, nearly three weeks, which was, for my husband, her son, an unbelievable experience.

My mother in law lived in California and she died at her boyfriend's home. Home death, said a friend who is a physician, is over rated. I get that. The nursing of the dying person at home is never very pretty. It's upsetting. It's smelly. It's not at all the way dying is in the movies. And yet, my husband said in one of his many call-in reports to me back east here at home, 'I'm not bored,' a comment i found very interesting. Trust me, he's easily bored. And yet as he watched over her, fetched her the very few and simple things that for a time she could eat or drink, helped to the bathroom when she could still get up to use it, and then helped her on to the bedside commode and later, twice before i could convince him it was time to get a home health aide in to do that duty, changed her diaper, he wasn't bored. He put her on the phone with me once when she could still handle that kind of communication and she told me she knew she just had one more thing she had to do but she couldn't remember what it was but she was trying.

At the end, it turned out that he had to fly back to New York when she was still living. Barely, but still there. I wondered if his leaving wouldn't trigger her release. It occurred to me that even only semi conscious that she didn't want him to see her dead. So back he flew and within 48 hours she was gone, forever.