I am about to become a caregiver again.

[calimary]

82. So many times I've had to turn to my children and deal with this.

What I found myself saying soooooo often was - "it's just one of those things." Not to minimize it in ANY way, mind you. It's just one of those things. Just one of those rites of passage we all have to go through - nursing our loved ones through it before we have to go through it ourselves, I suppose. It's just one of those things - that we poor feeble, fallible, all-too-human humans have to deal with on this physical level.

The human body fails. It just does. It grows old and infirm and it fails. Both my kids witnessed that in the long slow painful decline of two grandmothers and one grandfather. My husband's dad also was diagnosed with a long slow killer disease (a Lou Gehrig-type nervous system thing whose name was long and Latin and had about 16 syllables in it). He was able-bodied and able-minded til the end, when he suddenly took a turn for the worse because he couldn't swallow anymore, was hospitalized, and a week later he was gone. I figured it might be a reward from Overhead because he'd been such a kind man and led such an exemplary life. VERY happy to say he had NONE of the suffering the other three endured - which was PROFOUND, and rather heart-breaking. I wish they'd all had an easy, peaceful, relatively swift end the way he did. They didn't deserve this suffering. And my kids were there for it all. Btw - I was amazed that - at both my in-laws' funerals, the other kids weren't there. I dragged mine out of school to go stand with their grandma when their Apa died. Just seemed like that was how it was supposed to be. Where were the other nieces and nephews? Oh, off snowboarding, we were told. Oh, off with their friends. Oh, football practice dontchaknow. Oh, shit.

Just one of those things, I suppose. Human foibles and failings and all that. Not much we humble mortals can do about this stuff, except to try to endure and interpret and try to gain some wisdom and perspective that helps us, at least, to make sense of it.