Matthew Gates 6m 1,585 #usveteran
The views of this article are the perspective of the author and may not be reflective of Confessions of the Professions.
I’d been caring for an old man, a veteran who served under John F. Kennedy during the cuban missile crisis and was stationed in Guantanamo Bay, sometime around 1960 – 1962. He died yesterday and there was nothing more I could do to save him. I’d met him 20 years ago and he became a grandfather to me. No family but we developed a close bond, as he was a health-conscious man, and a constant jokester. “PMA. Not PMS. Positive Mental Attitude.”
These words are going on his tombstone because everyone he met, he had to recite it. He’d had early onset dementia since I knew him but he was an absolutely functioning man. Fortunately, towards his end, I was all he knew as I was ingrained into his long-term memory. I would take care of him and he would take care of me. For the most part, just up until a few years ago, he was largely independent. But I’d say to him, “Don’t worry, I’m taking care of you, and you are taking care of me. I appreciate you.” And he would reply, “One hand washes the other.”
I’d never thought we’d be facing the moment. I thought there was more time. He was 86 years old. He had three organs failing him: kidneys, liver, and heart. Before this, three years ago, I became his power of attorney after giving him a choice, as the state wanted to put him in a state-run nursing home after he had a bout of COVID-19. I told him I’d take him home but the only choice he had was to make me his guardian and I’d take him home so he could live out his days there.
Then he was diagnosed with colon cancer, and they prescribed him to oral radiation treatment since chemo was too dangerous for him. I’d spent almost 8 months getting two hospitals to cooperate with each other to give him the surgery he needed. Turned out, after 8 months, it was a misdiagnosis and just an oversized polyp that they cut out. Although this may have contributed to speeding up his organ failure, too many factors come to play and no one or no one thing in particular is to blame for his rapid deterioration.
I had to travel cross country to help take care of my parents, a mother with a stroke, and a father, a veteran of Vietnam, diagnosed with Agent Orange. Every year, I try to help out by relieving my siblings of their duties for about a month, allowing them to take a vacation to give them a break. When I returned home, I noticed his health started to deteriorate very quickly and his dementia got worse and he forgot how to take his medicine which caused even more health problems.
I was scrambling around going crazy about what to do with him. The nursing home was $7,000 a month. I tried to get him in-home hospice care but they wanted to just give him unskilled nursing which wasn’t enough to do anything. They went in there and were giving him rehabiliation exercises, while the man’s heart was overworked, and he was exhausted. They hadn’t even noticed the signs and I had to bring him to the emergency room. The doctor ignored my requests to keep him for an additional week for observations and released him early, and a week later, we were right back in the hospital, and then he got sent to rehab.
During this time, I was figuring out what to do about him, had a potential group home for veteran men willing to take him, but they called me a week later to tell me their rooms were all full. After almost a month of being in rehab, they called me to let me know they sent him back into the hospital, who determined his heart was failing, his blood pressure was too low, and he barely knew what was going on.
I told the doctor the situation and luckily, a doctor had known who he was… been his ICU doctor before, and let me know what to do. Three other doctors also came around who were monitoring him and they knew I looked helpless and confused. All four of them came to me and said, “We have two choices: keep pumping him full of medicine and alive. Or put him on pain meds and prep him for the next life.”
As per his wishes, he didn’t want to be hooked up to a machine and have his quality of life reduced to staring out of a hospital bedroom, not knowing who he was, and so I made the decision to end his life. I asked the doctors how long they think he had. “3 days to 1 week” was the response. He was put into hospice, where they kept him out of pain as much as possible, something they call “die with dignity”. When I got there, another nurse said, “It could be a month.” I visited him just about every day.
When he first arrived he slept for an entire day. Then he woke up. At first, he joked with the nurses, like his old self. He ate. He was in and out of consciousness and I could barely wake him up to feed him. At this point, he was only eating puree as he could hardly swallow food anymore. He arrived Saturday. Over the course of the week, he went from talking to mumbling to being unable to say a word and only grunt.
The following Saturday would be his last meal. Although hospice had no idea, and aside from veal parmesan, meatloaf was his absolute favorite. All puree: Meatloaf. Mashed Potatoes. Green beans. Coffee. Vanilla pudding. This was the last thing he would ever eat on this Earth again. I fed him. He ate over half this meal which, beforehand, he’d only been eating maybe 25% of his food. So I was grateful and happy to see him eat it.
This would be the last time I would also see him conscious to interact with me. Although another night, I did threaten to eat his vanilla pudding and he grunted, so I knew he could hear me. I continued visiting him, reciting his own jokes to him, reading some passages from a book they gave me on what death and passing were like, all the signs. He died on Tuesday night, after three days of not eating or drinking. They had started a morphine drip a few nights to prevent him from experiencing any pain.
He had no fear. He would always say, “We can’t fight it and eventually we all have to go sometime.” For the several years prior, we’d drive past the cemetary he was going to be buried at, as it was on the way to his doctor’s appointments, and I’d say to him, “That’s where you’re going to lie for an eternity.” And he would say, “Don’t remind me.” The last time I drove him to the hospital and we were driving past, I said the same thing to him. And this time, he said to me, “I think I’m ready.”
I sat with him in a quiet room in hospice, knowing what was coming, knowing there was nothing more I could do, but let him know that he didn’t have to go it alone, and that someone was there who loved him. I told him not to be afraid, that the Lord would receive him with open arms, and he had nothing to worry about. It was going to be a transition from this life to the next… and so he took his last breath on this Earth, after 86 years, and died peacefully in his sleep.
RIP Andrew J. Saxon, Navy Veteran of the United States of America, died on Tuesday August 8, 2023 at 7 PM.
As we had handled all of his business prior to his death, there was nothing that was uncertain. Nothing that I had to guess at what he wanted. A priest had already visited him. The funeral home was called and came to retrieve his body. He signed his expression and consent to be cremated. And that’s all there is to it. A man’s life on this Earth has come to an end. He is no more, while the sun still comes up the next day and people go about their lives, business as usual.
I’ve learned a lot about power of attorney affairs and handling your afterlife business while you are alive and on this Earth. It is not something we are taught or encouraged to do, leaving our family with the pains and burdens of figuring out our business and burying or cremating us. But if we embrace the fact that we all die — absolutely no one except a unique jellyfish species are not mortal, and will not be on this Earth forever, that in just a few seconds or minutes or tomorrow or anytime in the future, death will come, but we handle our business right now to make it easier on our families, then we can pass knowing what will happen to us, knowing that we handled our business while we were alive, and made our wishes known legally (via Will & Testament), you’d make your own life and death as easy as possible and the transition makes it so much easier.
Handle your business. And know that someday your time will come too.
Til then, PMA. Not PMS. Positive Mental Attitude.
Thank you for reading.
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