[Magdalen] RIP Sir Terry Pratchett

[James Oppenheimer-Crawford]

It seems most of the stories I have heard were along the lines of, "I had
just stepped out of the room to <get a meal/get some air/talk with a
MD/etc.> and in those moments he left." People seem to prefer to leave when
others are not present.  Your parents must have had a close and supportive
relationship.

The deaths in my family have generally been following a period of complete
non-responsiveness.

And yet: Helen, my dear mother-in-law, lay for days in a coma, and then
died on the same date as her beloved Vince died several years before.  It
wasn't until after she plugged her mother's birth and death dates into her
genealogy program that Christine realized this.

James W. Oppenheimer-Crawford
*“A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved,
except in memory. LLAP**”  -- *Leonard Nimoy

On Fri, Mar 13, 2015 at 2:46 PM, Scott Knitter <scottknitter at gmail.com>
wrote:

> On Fri, Mar 13, 2015 at 12:07 PM, ME Michaud <michaudme at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I sat with my mother as she was dying and I was ASTONISHED at
> > the similarities with labor and childbirth. Many years later I had a
> > friend who was a doula, and she said the same. Her father's dying
> > was more like childbirth than she ever would have imagined.
>
> I wasn't with my dad when he died, but my mom was. She was about to
> help him prepare to go to dinner, and he was found to have simply and
> silently departed. I know it depressed him to realize he was in the
> nursing home (a quite nice one) permanently; I like to think he looked
> around and decided life wasn't going to get better than that, his dear
> wife was there, and he somehow consented to (or nodded yes to a call
> to) step through the veil.
>
>
> --
> Scott R. Knitter
> Edgewater, Chicago, Illinois USA
>