The basketball tournament pool, as whimsical as it was, provided a welcome distraction from what was occupying mind most of Sunday, which was the fact that my Great Uncle Dick, who is 95 years old and whom I recently visited in Reno, was in the hospital on what was essentially end-of-life care.
Easter morning had begun joyfully. Ginger had made reservations for us and her folks at Zuzu, the restaurant inside the Valley Ho resort in downtown Scottsdale. The Valley Ho is a classic motel-type resort where celebrities stayed in the days when Scottsdale was a quiet escape from Hollywood. It was renovated in recent years to become the Mid-century Modern Resort of your dreams. The Easter buffet at the restaurant is very popular. Ginger could get only an 8 AM reservation, as it was the only time slot available. Fred particularly enjoyed the endless supply of crab legs.
After we got home I was relaxing and reading some emails when a text message popped on my screen. "Dad's in the hospital on comfort care." At first I was confused because I didn't connect the name of the sender, and of course my father passed away five years ago. I knew what "comfort care" meant. It meant that the person was about to die.
I thought maybe the message had been mis-sent to my phone number, as many messages are, but then I realized from the name that it was my mother's cousin, Dick's daughter, whom I had asked to keep my updated about anything related to her father.
"If it happens..." I had told Dick in Reno, when I saw him in his home. "When, not if," he corrected me.
I immediately jumped in. 'The only reason I say if is because there is still no guarantee that I will outlive you. I'm lucky to be alive as it is." He understood that. I think how he flew all those bombing missions in the war and could have been shot out of the sky.
I had told him that I knew I was being selfish in wanting him to stick around as long as possible.
Now I knew from his daughter's message that this might be the moment. She said pictures of her and Dick and other family members of hers that I didn't recognize. They were huddled together out in the sunlight. It had been taken on Good Friday, just two days before.
"Went downhill very fast," she added, after I commented on the wonderful photo. I was glad that Dick had gotten out in the sunlight again. He spent much of his life as hiker in the outdoors, and he hated having to give that up in his late Eighties when he injured his hip. Now the idea of his going out on the trail was not a possibility. He was too frail for that, even on a good day.
Watching him in his home and hearing him talk about his routine has been an eye-opening experience about aging. It is natural when we are young to want to live a very long life, but at some point you begin to understand what that entails---the hardships of having your body break down, no matter how well you have taken care of it.
Still he is a tough old bird. My late grandmother, his older sister, was the same way. They are thin and small of body, but they live a long time. It was only last year that his last sibling, my Great Aunt Jan, died in her nursing home in Nebraska.
Hearing the news about Dick put me in a funk for the rest of Easter Day. I carried around a sense of dread knowing that at any moment I could hear that he was gone. I tried calling him (he is a phone person) but my phone battery decided that very day to fail and the phone would barely stay on. I created a new Google Voice number just to be able to call him using my computer, although I knew he wouldn't recognize the number. I left a message that was essentially a somber goodbye, as I didn't know what else to say.
Sunday evening came and went without any updates from his daughter Laurie. On Monday afternoon I sent a followup text message to Laurie saying that I was praying for all of them. Referring to Dick's service aboard a B-17 in the war, I said "tell that old waist gunner I'm going to miss him terribly." I added that I was going to cry for a week when I heard he was gone.
Almost immediately I got a text from Laurie--"You're not going to believe this, but the doctors are sending him home." She added a second message, "They can't believe it."
I replied in text dialect "HA HA HA I totally believe it."
She supplied some photos of Dick, shrunken and emaciated, walking around his hospital room. He looked like Lazarus coming out of the tomb.
It was moment of great joy, thinking of him like that. Of course, as Dick would insist, he could croak tomorrow (as my mom's family would put it), and perhaps I will get a message any time that he is gone. But he has given us the gift of lifting from us the Vigil of Dread. I suspect it will be something out-of-blue when it happens. I told his daughter that in my prayers I ask my own guardian angel to tell her father's guardian angel to look out for him that way.
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