Why would I tell you to go to Hell, Imp? Its nice of you to care.
If I gave you all of the grimmer details you would get the wrong impression. Keeping it simple. My son lived with us. In the year before his death, he was our loving care giver. He was a recovered alcoholic. The pressures of caring for us added to work stresses pushed him back to drinking. From being our savior, he became another problem. We never got an autopsy back, but he either fell and hit his head, or drank himself to death. I can't stress too much what a truly loving person he was. We loved him dearly, but with his addiction and at fifty years old his life's prospects were dim. We looked at his death as saving him from a very unhappy future.
My wife was a forty year diabetic. She had to use a walker and I walk with a cane. I took her to dialysis three times a week where she had needles stuck in her and was hooked to a machine for four hour sessions. We did that for three years or more, driving over dark, snow covered roads in the Winter at 6:30AM. She eventually started falling down, and was sent to a rehab facility. She gradually deteriorated and became permanently hospitalized without hope of ever coming home. She developed early dementia towards the very end, and then they found a tumor on her colon. As with my son, her death ended years of suffering and she was no longer able to enjoy her life.
I have always been a realist. As tragic as it truly has been for me, on reflection, their passing was for the best for both of them. There is no happy answer to the ending that must come to all couples. I am just glad that I was able to be around to see my sweetie off. As I've posted elsewhere, our last months together were some of the happiest days of our life. Loving and laughing, we did a lot of summing up of our life together and found it to be good. What more can you ask for?
