This just flat out sucks

[BobTheSubgenius]

23. I'm sorry for your plight, and sorry for not having anything profound or helpful to offer.

My parents both went through long, awful declines. My mother from a very slow-developing analog of Alz's, but not Alz's....and my father's slide starting with a stroke. I'm sure that a few years of trying to soldier through my mother's decline on his own hastened his own demise,

By the time he died, he had fallen out of bed and whacked his head so hard he was in a coma for 3 days, but he had already deteriorated badly by then, and was in Long Term Care. He had phlebitis, an enlarged heart, cardiac arrhythmia, diabetes, a certain amount of incontinence, colon cancer and his 7th stroke killed him...but the following day, not immediately.

(I feel that I inherited his apparent genetic strength for survival. For example, both my surgeon and my cardiologist said that my heart was the most damaged [Staph A] they had seen anyone survive.)

I could not escape the feeling that their passing was a mercy on them, and on my sister and I, for which I felt guilty... and guiltier still that I didn't feel worse about it. It was bizarre.

I feel you are at an almost identical crossroads. Very often, IMNSHO, I feel that people wish for their dying relatives to string out every last hour, but mostly because of their own inability and unwillingness to experience grief.

I guess I can only ask - if you were the one in your mother's plight, and could stand outside of it and think lucidly, what would you hope for?