My brother Kevin, the older of my two younger brothers, is dying. My sister Julie got a call from his friend and downstairs neighbor a couple of weeks ago. Kevin had gone in an ambulance to a local hospital in Binghamton. He’d been transferred to a hotshot cancer joint by the time she called back.
She’s been going back and forth from Harrisburg weekly.
Kevin is now in a nursing home in Norwich, 50 miles north of Binghamton. What started as an aggressive kidney cancer has metastasized to his brain, spine, bones, and lymph nodes. She got a call from the hospice folks Thursday, saying that he was going downhill so fast that she’d better get up there again this weekend (she’d tried to get local friends to visit him and take a weekend herself to pay bills and wash clothes, that sort of thing—she does hold an approximately fulltime job and a supplemental contract gig) if she wanted to see him while he still recognized her.
She did, and he is in fact declining that fast.
We’re hoping he does go fast, because at this point he’s in pain (controlled as well as possible, I think) and with-it enough to be frustrated by things like not being able to use words most of the time, not quite knowing how to pick up a fork and eat, that sort of thing. I talked to him this morning, and he was way less able to talk than the last couple times I’ve done that. But Julie said he was grinning after the conversation.
Anyone who knows me well knows that my relationship with Kevin, my ex-ex-brother, has been complicated to say the least. The rest, well, take my word for it. This is barbed in so many directions it’s like a diet of triple fishhooks.
More later, but it might be a while. Sometimes I’m OK and sometimes I have trouble seeing the keyboard.
Posted by: Ron Sullivan
1 | By: jael on November 16, 2009 at 05:03 AM
just a huge hug ron, and many, many good thoughts.