On Hospice

This past weekend I sat with my family and watched over my uncle in hospice. I have a lot of thoughts about it that I want to smooth out but here's the rough stuff.

-The postmodern body. The human body used to be seen as a work of art, but now we see it as any other object. It's stripped down, devoid of any individuality, and placed on a stainless table to get poked and prodded by doctor's. They examine it and come to conclusions and ignore the individual. That's all any of us really are in the end.

-Watching role models collapse. It's part of growing up, but seeing adults that you look up to in compromising positions is never really easy. It means that they are weak and fallible too. Part of this is seeing my uncle laid out on a bed. I knew it'd be surreal seeing him like that, but I didn't fully realize that he'd be moving differently and barely able to talk. It wasn't like he was a shadow of his healthy self (even just a shadow of him would have been a huge personality) it was as though he was stripped down to the basics of existence. Water, pain, sleep. And seeing all of the adults grieving around him was also surreal. Seeing grandparents lose their child, or my mom lose her older brother. It's hard to watch.

-Holding vigil. Sitting with someone while they are dying is a surreal experience. There's nothing you can do but sit there and be with them. At first I kept freaking out, hanging on every breath. It was a strange kind of white noise in the room. Breath and the heartbeat are so unique as really the only audible evidence of life in a body (you can hear the nervous system make a high-pitched noise sometimes, but I'm not counting that since you rarely can hear that). But we never pay any attention to them, we take it for granted that we're breathing and our heart is beating and we are alive. So gathering with the express purpose of listening to that noise is really special. And after a while I got more comfortable with it, this could be the last one. Or this one. Or this. And it made me freak out less.

-Memory. This isn't the way I want to remember my uncle. But it definitely isn't an experience that I want to forget either.

Maybe I'll flesh these out later. But it was a hard weekend and I'm definitely not doing it now.