As I told my friend Charles a few minutes ago, I'm trying to find a balance right now, emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually, but the anchor point I need remains elusive. The process of dying is much harder to watch than it is to experience (and I am in a relatively elite group that can make that claim with a basis of knowledge, so I'm not just spinning platitudes), and that makes this a particularly distressing process.
It's the cruel anomaly of medicine, I guess: we know the point that Dad's moving to, but medicine can do nothing to help him get there without the horrid process itself. When a living will has been invoked at the specific written request of the patient, there should be some simple, dignified way to allow thost instructions to be fulfilled.
Twelve days now since the process began, and ten days since Dad left us... but we're in a purgatory between this world and what lies beyond, waiting on Dad to complete the transition to something better than what life has dealt him.
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