Dying With Dignity

In Memoriam

July 10, 1998


My parents wanted to die with dignity, at home without tubes and respirators and heroic methods to prolong the agony that cancer’s invasion was doing to them.
It was hard enough for us, seeing them suffer through the stages of the disease, I can’t even imagine what it was like for them, especially the way they tried to be strong against cancer’s will.
I used to get angry at both of them for not seeking the medical attention that could have given an early alarm.
By the time we saw any kind of signs, it was too late.
Even in their last few months, they tried to go about their routines in between the ever increasing hospital visits for surgeries, radiation, chemotherapy, exhaustion, the whole gamut of trials and tests in their treatments.

Often they were in the hospital at the same time, in separate rooms and, of course, too weak to visit each other.
Those treatments seemed like more torture than the disease.
I remember one very poignant scene that almost erased the stress involved with caring for two parents who were terminally ill.
About two weeks before Daddy died, they both had just come home from the hospital. Mommy liked to lay down with her head at the foot of the bed so my sister was making her comfortable in the bedroom while I got Daddy comfortable in his wheelchair.
When they were both as comfortable as we could make them, daddy asked to see “his girl”.

I wheeled him into the bedroom beside her and my sister and I went about doing some of the necessities while they were resting.

After a few minutes, I started into the bedroom to see if they wanted anything then stopped and quietly called my sister to come see this “picture”...

a bittersweet memory … that stays with me to this day ..

Both of them bald from the ravages of chemo , she lying on the bed, he in his wheelchair holding hands now in sickness, as they had in health, too exhausted to even talk.

They made it known to all of us ...

no tubes or heroic methods...

They wanted to die with dignity...

and they did … at home .. with us ..



Dad died November 4, 1995

Mom died February 27, 1997
United once again .. cancer free .. in heaven.
© 1998 Joyce E Coley



I wasn't quilting then or they would have gotten this one ...