R.I.P. Fred

I've been visiting Fred every week since last August.

A couple of weeks ago I went to Fred’s for the usual Sunday morning visit. He was in fine form, for a dying man. He was up, by which I mean he was in his hospital bed, sitting up, leaning against his pillows, awake and playing video poker, smoking a cigarette and telling jokes, though having a bit of a problem remembering things, such as words.

No big. I often have problems with words. They’re slippery things and tend to wander off on their own, slithering away like camouflaged snakes, so you don’t know they’re gone until you can’t find them.

I gave him a nebulizer treatment, and a handful of his noon pills. It’s a big handful, the noon pills.

I fixed him an egg with cheese. Just one this time, not the usual two. And he’d taken to asking for it in a bowl, so he could eat like he used to, when he was in country and used chopsticks. Alas, there were no chopsticks, so he made do with a fork. He ate it all.

I did the dishes, cleaned up, and then helped him with his commode situation, which means, mostly, getting him back into bed from the commode, which is a step away from his bed.

When his wife returned from church I hugged him goodbye, and said I’d see him the next week.

I didn’t. I had to have someone else fill in for me when I realized that the next Sunday was the day Stew died one year ago, and I just couldn’t sit with another dying person on that day. May 31st was already taken as a day of mourning. So instead my charming husband and I took the dogs to the coast and celebrated Stew’s life in our own way. We played on the beach, and we drove down meandering roads just to see where they went, and we even found a pioneer cemetery to explore. I like reading the headstones, even those that can be barely read at all, the ones that have been so marked by time there’s no telling who’s lying there.

Two days later I received a call from the hospice chaplain. Fred passed away on June 1st, his wife and a caregiver by his side.

My first thought was that now Fred can breathe again. No more fighting for air, no more wasting away, unable to do anything for himself. He’s free.

I told my husband, and he said, “You didn’t get to say goodbye to him.”

“I said goodbye to him every time I left,” I said, “because you never know when it’s going to happen.”


R.I.P. Fred