October 25, 2011. It was 46 degrees outside my summer home in Cape Vincent, NY at 8 am this morning. Not bad for the North Country just a month out from Thanksgiving.
I am here out of season because my sister Nora is busy dying in the first-floor bedroom of the home her husband John built for their family 7 miles away in Rock Beach on the St. Lawrence River. I use the term “busy” advisedly. It looks like hard work lying there, her eyes closed mostly. She’s on drugs to ease the pain, but it’s painful nonetheless. Her legs and belly have swelled up with fluid because her liver has been compromised by the ovarian cancer.
Her voice is high-pitched when she speaks. And when she speaks, there are gaps and pauses which I fill with questions and comments. This is a new thing. Nora was always such a rapid-fire talker (we called her “Chatty Cathy” as a child) that I rarely spoke in our conversations.
I feel so badly for her. But I know this is the process. She fought hard for five and a half years. Just last month, she came down to my house in New Jersey and had a wonderful night at a tavern with friends from Bergenfield High School. She had had her hair and make-up done and she didn’t look sick at all. She looked fabulous.
She hasn’t really eaten in 18 months because the cancer blocked her intestinal tract. (She sometimes sucked on Cheetohs to get the taste of the salt.) She’s gotten her nutrition from a nightly drip in her arm. But she’s been a trooper. In May she underwent an operation in Boston to unblock her intestines because she desperately wanted to eat again. That surgery didn’t work out.
She is still on her liquid nutrition, and for that reason, Hospice didn’t want to take her as a client. But Hospice has now agreed to see her, and so a hospice worker will come today.
Her husband John helps her to get up and urinate in a Porta-potty in her room and helps her with her meds. John and son Nick spend time each day working on a junker car for daughter Kendall and a new engine for Nick’s truck. We eat dinner together –sometimes with John and Nora’s friends Dee-Dee and Stuie, who live two doors down. We keep watch.
Is Nora going to an afterlife? If there is no afterlife, that would be okay, I think. There would be the peace of nothingness after the celebration of life in full swing.
But I’ve worked with a couple of mediums when I hosted a talk show. They seem to be reading something. It could be the energy memory in the person they are reading, I suppose.
When my mother was in her last years and suffering from Alzheimer’s, one medium said my late father told her that he and other family spirits talked to my Mom while she slept and urged her to come to the other side. My Mom, being an extremely stubborn woman, resisted. My Mom ultimately died in a nursing home while I was visiting my sister Marian in Arizona. I felt awful I wasn’t there. But it was just like my Mom not to want any death-bed scene.
I do believe there is a fulcrum, a point at which the weight of your life-force hangs in the balance between life and death. Nora seems at that point now. There is nothing we can do but keep watch and bear witness.
