married again.

She was still a beautiful woman, ] thought. Her hair was pure white. Her teeth were gone and her face had become craggy, but it's perfectly okay for very old people to look very old. 1 liked her better without the false teeth. That way, she had more natural dignity.

1 liked her better, too, without make-up. Make-up on a very old woman's face can be macabre.

lt seemed to me, in a way, she. glowed. Maybe. what ! saw was her spirit gathering itself for the great leap. Her shade, medieval people would have called it. Her aura departing. Something like that.

She has been in and out of the hospital, in and out, in and’ out. The strokes or seizures or whatever they are come at neariy monthly in- tervals now, like the con- tractions of labor, only in reverse.

It ‘seems, for her, leaving

the world will be at least as agonizing as the entry. More blood” and messes. More body-racking ‘convulsions; More time on the rack. _¢ Only this departure ‘is ‘far more painful, more drawn- out than birth. There are the needles they jam into her stick of an arm. The skin is bruised a permanent brown around the needic holes, as though already mummified.

In her eyes, there is tremendous fear.-

She thinks she has been in

an auiomobile accident, even

though. she hasn't. She°

thinks there are corpses in the closet across the room.

She. hurts all. over, of course. Her buttocks have been numb a long time from the bed, but how can you twist into a more comfor- table position without the catheter pulling lore? And the tubes running up the nose, so thin and richly veined, the once-smooth skin almost transparent ...

Every time she alinost dies, she is rushed to a machine that jerks her back into the land of the living where the hurt continues.

Sometimes she shivers even though she feels like she’s burning.

The nurses took away the button she used to call them every 20 minutes to com- plain about something new. It is a vicious spiral. She makes an effort, at first, to ask questions about the out- side world. But her own world is so entirely filled up with discomforts and frustrations and pain that it is quite impossible for her to keep up the small talk,

“This isn't right,’’ she whispered to me.

All I could do was shake my head, clench my jaws. It took a moment tu say, ‘'iNo, it's not right.”

1 knew what the right thing to do was. It was perfectly clear. The right thing to do was to somehow

4 - Wednesday, March 6, 1985 - North Shore News

strictly personal

by Bob Hunter

Long, cruel death

nce she had been a beautiful woman. Men had fought over her. She had been married and divorced, married and divorced, and

Jet her go. The feeling I had was the same kind of feeling 1 get when | see a mutilated animal in a leghold trap. For God's sake, end the misery! Just a couple of years ago, the guy whom all the kids called Gramps finally passed away after nearly a year in one of these beds. He was better off, in a way. Most of

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the time, he wasn’t there. His mind was adrift.

So he probably didn't feel the catheter so much, the needles, the bedpans being removed, the tubes in the nose. The needles. The nec- dles. The needles.

And somehow it is all passed off, this torture, as humanitarianism. Let them go, I say. Beyond a certain point, we just shouldn't be saved any more. I know | don’t want to be.

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When survival becomes torture, it’s just not worth it any longer. In supposedly more barbaric eras a cap- tured enemy prayed for a quick death. Nowadays, like inquisitors (who also claimed they did it in the name of love) we inflict a long cruel dying.

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