It's All Good

My kid sister died about a month ago. I'm still processing it. I tried to capture it below, but I'm so close to it that I can't tell if it's worth reading, or it's TMI. I didn't want to post it in the workshop, because it's not meant as a project but as an effort to understand.

I recently touched death, touched it when I held the icy-cold, blackened, hand of my dying kid sister and learned from her the art of dying right.

Susan (not her real name) was diagnosed with cancer about four months earlier, but had been on a chemotherapy regime that seemed to be working. Whenever I asked how she was doing she said fine. And I asked her relatively often, since she and I had only re-established real communication about a year earlier.

Our 20-year estrangement, pointless and unnecessary as it seems now, had been nonetheless real. But once we’d broken through that, we began to catch up on what had been lost, and were texting and calling on a regular basis. Since we lived 500 miles apart and my weekend visits were always crowded and crammed, we hadn’t yet sat down alone and talked. I was about to write her a long email saying all the things I th0ught needed saying when I got a call from my daughter suggesting I come down immediately, because Susan was in the hospital and it didn’t look good.

After a 7-hour drive I went directly to the hospital and up to Susan’s room. Walking in I saw my nephew John, Susan’s 35-year-old firstborn. A big, bearded man, taller than me, he walked over, put his head on my shoulder, and sobbed. I looked around the room and saw Susan’s other son, her daughter and son-in-law, her ex-husband, and my daughter all standing with red-rimmed eyes.

Susan lay in her hospital bed, looking with almost childlike intensity at her hands, which she held out in front of her, red blotches forming on the wrists and palms. Her lower legs and feet were uncovered and also blotched, which I wrongly presumed was due to some medication. She recognized me and greeted me softly as I bent down to her tired face.

My memories of the next two days are a blur of friends and family and medical personnel coming in and out, phone calls, cold pizza, and short nights. I held out until my two oldest and closest friends, a married couple, showed up. When the wife asked me how I was doing I tried to answer but couldn’t speak when reality welled up without warning. I lay my head on her shoulder and sobbed as she hugged me while her husband stood by. But soon the grief melted again into love. I got myself back together, and we stood by Susan’s bed and talked with her.

As time went by it became obvious Susan was not going to get better. The doctors explained that the cancer and chemo had combined to weaken her immune system and she had developed a massive infection that was causing severe and untreatable blood clotting throughout her body. Her hands and feet had hurt because the blood had pooled behind the clots; they no longer hurt her because they had, for all intent and purpose, died. The doctors said they had done what they could, but the only real option at this point was palliative care. They said she could live for a few months, or could go any time. Her sons began contacting local hospice providers, a challenging task on a Thursday.

Palliative care meant generous use of painkillers and on the third day Susan actually seemed to be better. At least she was awake and not in pain. And almost miraculously the sons had found a hospice ready to spring into immediate action. That afternoon her kids, her two closest friends, and I gathered her up into a wheelchair and took her down to the cancer ward’s private garden, where we enjoyed the warm September sun, sat and talked, even laughed a bit. All the while her hands and feet were blackening, dying for lack of blood flow. But at least they didn’t hurt her anymore.

One thing she said, one phrase she often repeated, was simply, “it’s all good.” She smiled every time she said it.

After we took her upstairs again, the hospice said they were ready to help out in any way they could. When they asked Susan what she wanted, her answer was simple. “If I can’t get well, I want to go home.” The hospice immediately ordered up a hospital bed and sent that and medical supplies to her home, and promised to take her there first thing in the morning.

The hospice people were good as their word, transported her home and put her in her bed, which had been set up in her dining room, with a view of the backyard she loved.

But Susan never saw it. She had fallen into a deep sleep that night in the hospital and never opened her eyes again. But they say the sense of hearing is the last to go, and if that's true, she knew she was home, knew she was loved.

Later that morning our 97-year-old mother was brought over, and she sat on a chair beside Susan’s bed, holding Susan’s blackened hand and talking through her tears, revisiting scenes from Susan’s childhood. Every time Mom took a break, someone else came over. When I was there I said, haltingly through my own tears, how much I loved her, and, recalling what I could about Buddhist and Quaker teachings, advised her to trust in the universe and always seek out the bright light. I quoted her own words back to her, “remember, it’s all good.” And as I looked around the room, felt and saw the love emanating from all those caring and concerned faces, I knew it to be true.

When I look back, more than anything else I marvel at the way Susan’s slow death brought so many of us together, how rooms filled with grief and tears also teemed with love and openness, and how all that rekindled bonds between family and friends.

It hurt awfully, of course, and it still hurts. When I think back at those days, the image that invariably comes first to my mind is the sensation of holding her cold, blackened, hand and looking into the those closed eyes destined to never reopen. Until Susan’s passing I never could have pictured a scene like that with anything other than dread. But now that image invariably fades into warm memories of hugs and tears, even laughter through those tears as we remembered the old days.

I know that Susan would be pleased to know she left such a legacy. To know that in her own way, she was a woman of her word. That she showed us how it is, indeed, “all good.”