Ramble On

Simple Decisions

Sometimes a simple choice you need to make can become like a 50-pound weight chained to your ankle. It doesn’t keep you from being able to walk around. But it is with you everywhere you go, adding weight and slowing you down, and you can’t forget it needs your attention. Because some decisions that seem simple, usually to other people, are really much more complex to you. All week long I have known I needed to decide whether or not I was going to make this one particular phone call. I could summarize the basic situation in one sentence. To explain the struggle behind the decision would take much more, too much delving into family history. I did what most people do- I weighed the pros and cons, sought advice (from my sister, who wondered why I was making it into such a big deal), and went back and forth a million times in my head. At work I picked up my cell phone and unlocked the keys at least 5 times. They would lock again while I stalled, on the verge of entering a number. And I would tell myself I’d deal with it later.

So ultimately I made my decision, and it was probably the selfish one, the one that was easier for me. But I wonder if it really was the easier choice, because that 50-pound weight still seems to be attached.

Whew! Not A Cheery Post Here

I attended my hospice volunteer training session today…..

When my brother called to say that my dad was probably only going to live another two or three hours, according to the hospice nurse, I told him I would get up first thing in the morning and head down there. We had been waiting on this call for a long time and we couldn’t make it down there in 2 or 3 hours anyway, so it seemed sensible to wait until the morning to leave. But a half hour later, while trying to pack clothes for the funeral, I suddenly knew I had to try and I asked Brandon if he thought we might be able to make it down there in time. He jumped up and said we’d try and we threw things in the car and took off. You’d think driving 4 hours in the dark to get to your dying parent would make for a long miserable drive. For some reason, though, I remember laughing a lot. In that way that happens when your emotions get all weird that allows you to laugh at the most inappropriate times. At some point in the drive, we had the funniest conversation imagining if we saw a spaceship land in one of the fields beside the road and were trying to tell people about what we had seen. I can’t recount it in a way that would seem funny here, but I had tears running down my face from laughing so hard. Any song from the Coldplay album that was out then reminds me of that drive. I remember glancing at the speedometer often. Sometimes we would take a break from talking and I would ask again if he thought we might make it before Dad died.

We did make it, he was still breathing when we walked into the house. My dad was fighting death as hard as he could until the very end. He was never aware of the presence of his 4 kids and other loved ones around his bed. Or maybe he was; I talked to him as if he could hear me. At one point in the middle of the night my 80-something year old grandmother got up and said, “Lukie, now you listen to me. This is your mama, and I am telling you that you have fought long enough now, and it is time for you to let go. Do you hear me? You just need to quit fighting and be at peace.” Yet even more hours passed with those horrible gasping breaths. Finally the intervals between his breaths grew longer, and I asked my great-aunt to go wake up siblings who had gone to rest for a moment. We were all gathered around his bed, holding his hands or patting a leg and telling him we loved him and what a great dad/husband/son he had been. Through the entire night his unseeing eyes had stared into space and his mouth had been open, but now he closed his mouth in one final gulp and blinked his eyes. A tear ran down his cheek and I brushed it away.  Twenty seconds went by, and we all looked around at each other and some of us started to cry. Then more seconds passed. I had read in some of the hospice literature that hearing is the last thing to go, so I kept talking in his ear so that maybe he wouldn’t hear all his loved ones crying so hard over him. My granddad, who can’t hear, had been sitting on the sofa by the bed and he stood up and said, “Is he gone, is my boy gone?” And Brandon told him he was. We stood around crying until finally somebody asked what we were supposed to do next. The hospice agency was called and thankfully they stepped in and started taking care of all the next steps. I went to lie down.

I remember saying in bed that morning that there had been something beautiful about being a part of his death, something special about feeling all the love in that room focused on one man, and how privileged I felt to have shared such an intimate moment. To see the actual moment he was released from his wrecked body, to be with him in the last minutes of his life.

I don’t have any kind of summation, any kind of insight or wisdom derived from this event to share in closing. Nothing like that. It was just on my mind today.

Connections

    Yesterday I went over to Tish and Joey's house. Some people were watching a football game; mainly people were catching up with each other and chasing the costumed children running around the yard. It was The Doghouse crew, and it made me sentimental for the days when I lived in my Decatur house. I lived on one end of the street, Jill and Kristian lived about 8 houses down from me, Mico and Lisa lived next to them, and Brandon lived on the corner with Joey and then Bethany. Susan R was my roommate until Brandon moved in with me. And there was another entire group of people who did not live on the street but might as well have for all the time they spent there. It's where Tish and Joey met, where friends announced engagements and pregnancies. Even though some of the inevitable bad things that are part of life did occur while living there, I remember my time on the street as being one of the happiest periods of my life. Susan R and I would hop on our bikes in our pajamas and ride down to hang out in Jill and Kristian's hot tub on Sunday nights. We'd walk up to the Shell station to buy ice cream and stop along the way to talk to friends out in their yard. But The Doghouse, which is the garage behind Mico and Lisa's house, was Command Central for the social scene.  You didn’t need to call and see if it was okay to come over, there was always a group hanging out. Lazy afternoons would stretch into late evenings while the group would grow and more chairs would be pulled up to the circle. Mico's dad would be reciting poetry, Chicken would be making his hilarious and absurd observations, Lisa would be doing some last minute gardening. Food would be on the grill and there would be music, always music. Most of the people in the group played some instrument or another and would often start up playing while the rest of us sat around listening and drinking beer.
      It's hard to describe what made hanging out at The Doghouse so special. You know when you are sitting with a group of people you really like and everyone is laughing and sharing stories, most of which have been told before so many times that everyone in the group knows them already but is still happily listening and smiling in anticipation of the funny part they know is coming? And you suddenly get hit with the awareness that you are existing in a perfect moment? That is what it was like.
      I wish I could have bottled up the essence of those days- the carefree feeling, the camaraderie, the laughter, the feeling of being connected- so that I could pull it out now, years later, and drink in the joi d'vivre. At the very least, I need to remember it more often and make sure that I work harder to keep all these relationships alive. Sometimes I feel untethered, floating. I miss the sense of community, the sense of belonging. I haven't had enough of that in my life lately, and I am trying to make more of an effort to find that again. Even if it isn’t as easy and spontaneous as walking a few steps down the road.

Passing Through Ghosts

         I look forward to every new season and love those first days when you feel the hint of change in the air. I am probably affected by this time of year more than any other season. Fall summons so many emotions, contradictory emotions, in me. On the one hand it reminds me of endings. Summer, with its associated sense of freedom carried over from childhood, is ending. Plants will be dying or becoming dormant. The days get shorter, and we’re rounding the corner that will bring us to the end of another year. But because it also is the start of the school year and I spent 17 years as a student and 15 years as a teacher I also associate fall with beginnings. Each school year was a renewal, a fresh start, and chance to do things differently. I always approached the start of the school year with such optimism and excitement at having a clean slate. Even though I am no longer on the academic calendar, I can’t help but feel this is the time for fresh starts. I just really love Fall. I love sweaters. I love tights. I love pulling out my boots for the first time. I love festivals, and falling leaves and even though I carry on about how much I hate sports, I love when I am sitting outside at my parent’s house and I hear the high school marching band practicing down the road. I think Fall smells better, although I imagine many people would argue in favor of spring. Many of my most vivid memories are from this season.

    Last night I went to see a band and because it was so nice outside the guy I was with suggested that we walk from my place. We were chatting as we made our way down the sidewalk when I walked through a pocket of cooler air - my grandmother used to say this was passing through the soul of a dead person who hadn’t made it to heaven yet - and I got this odd feeling. Somewhat like déjà vu, somewhat like the scenes in movies or TV shows when they show the character who’s car is spinning him towards his death experiencing a quick flashback montage of his life; it was a rush of memories type of thing. In this brief moment, I could feel exactly how I felt when I was 7 and raking leaves in our yard, or 14 and hoping the guy I had a crush on would talk to me at the school Halloween festival, or 24 and camping with friends. But it also seemed I could feel how it would be at the end of my life, like I knew how I would feel as an 87 year old remembering past seasons and people who had come and gone and remembering how it felt to be 40 and walking down the sidewalk on my way to a show on a Fall evening. I felt like I was watching myself from a distance, seeing myself smiling and laughing, through the eyes of an old woman looking back. This rush of feelings happened and then passed in an instant, and I never even stopped the sentence I was saying or changed my expression.

Speed Scrabble: Metaphor for Life (maybe)

Last night Jen, Susan, and I nixed plans to go to the drive-in because Project Runway wouldn't be over before dark. They are hopelessly addicted. It turned out to be a fun, low-key evening and of course involved playing Speed Scrabble, which seems to be another addiction for them. They introduced me to Speed Scrabble last weekend at the lake. I was wary, because I am not a huge Scrabble fan. In a competition for the slowest moving activity, it would be a tie between playing Scrabble and watching the hair on my head grow. God. You have a turn, put a word down, and then 10 hours later you get to go again. That is if you are playing with just one other person. Play with four people and you might not get another turn until after breakfast the next day. You can spend some of that long wait figuring out where you can make your next word, but it is inevitable that someone will screw up your plan before you can go again. That is when I get impatient and just throw down words that make it appear I dropped out of school in 2nd grade- high scoring words like to, by, an, or go.

This impatience is why I have always preferred games played with ticking buzzers or tiny hourglasses, but because Speed Scrabble does feature the word speed in the title, I was intrigued. I also felt pretty confident, because I felt sure I have higher scores in TextTwist than anyone at the lake last weekend. (I am also probably the only one who even plays TextTwist on the computer because they all have better things to do with their time.) I thought some of those fast word-scrambling skills would come in handy.

If you've never played Speed Scrabble, the way the girls taught me last weekend was to make 2 piles of 7 and 9 tiles. At once everyone turns the pile of 7 over and you rush to form words with them. Everyone is working individually. As soon as someone has used all 7 tiles to make words, they say "Next" and everyone has to flip over a tile from the second pile of tiles and use that one as well. You keep going until all of the 9 additional tiles have been flipped over and used and the first person to make words, Scrabble-style, out of all 16 tiles is the winner.

Well, I was greatly humbled at how terribly I played the game. I would get two short words and then never progress further. I lost every time. But last night I was determined to redeem myself. After repeating my previous dismal performance in the first round, I realized what I was doing wrong. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched several times as both Jen and Susan would take apart the words they'd made and completely reconfigure them as the new tiles were added in order to make new words that would accommodate all the tiles. I, on the other hand, would make my initial word or two, be happy I came up with those good words, and then when I would have to draw a new tile I would try to make it work with what I already had. Most times I couldn't do it. It just hadn't occured to me to scratch my original words and try to do better with all new combinations. Once I realized this, I started to win rounds.

I think my Speed Scrabble technique is kind of similar to how I have lived my life in some ways. I get started with a good plan and stick with it and then when new events or circumstances get thrown into the mix I get stuck because I am reluctant to abandon my original words, I mean plans. I don't want to scramble them up again because they were so good when I made them and it is scary to start completely over so far along in the game, but unfortunately they don't always work when I get a "Next". This perseverance has served me well many times in the past and has helped me see many things to a successful completion, but I think my goal for the future is to be more willing to scramble things up and start from scratch when necessary to make new things work. Otherwise I am always going to be holding tiles that don't work with what I already have and watching everyone else race ahead of me. I am going to try to be more open to possibilities that exist outside of my original vision.

When I was leaving last night I realized that we had not been keeping any kind of score, so I tried to determine who had won the most rounds. Knowing my competitive game-playing nature, Jen and Susan both said, "You won the most. You were the winner." And I was happy. I know there is probably another lesson to learn here about not always having to win or keep score, but I will save that for another time. I was just glad that I won.

People Are Complex

The community I grew up in was called Hopeful (which invites a lot of jokes because the only thing I was hopeful for was getting out of there) and it was 15 miles from the nearest town. By town, I mean small grouping of buildings with 5 stoplights. But Hopeful did have a general store, a peanut mill, and a Baptist Church. And we had a small group of young people who would get crammed into a car, sometimes 8 at a time, for the drive into town where we attended a dinky private school, the kind of school that could be found in all the other small towns around. Established circa 1971, around the time segregation was kicking in full force. In other words, the white school.

The year I was in first grade, I carpooled into town with a group of mainly older kids. I was super shy so I never opened my mouth during the drive. There was one kind of plain-looking girl in the group who was about 5 years older than me. I remember her being very nice to me. I knew her from church, too. I found her dad a little intimidating, and was especially quiet on his days to drive. Her name was Terri and I was fascinated with her because her mom was dead and I didn't know anyone else like that.

Over the next couple of years Terri would often baby-sit us when my parents would go to parties or whatever. My siblings and I liked her, even though she was a little quieter and more reserved than our other babysitters. I sensed somehow, from the hushed tones my mom and grandmother used when talking about her, that something was "not right" in Terri's family, beyond the whole no mom thing. She transferred to public school at some point and I didn't see her very much.

When I was in 5th grade, my mom came in the den and Terri was with her and Mom announced that Terri was going to be staying with us a few days. I just remember her being very sad and mopey. She must have been about 15 or so, and she just sat on the floor looking forlorn and ignoring our efforts to get her to play with us. She was reading the book Carrie. Her dad drove up at some point and sat in our driveway. My mom called my uncle and he came over and made her dad leave. I never really knew what all was going on, but I thought it had something to do with her dad being a terrible drunk. After a few days we came home from school and asked where Terri was and my mom said she had gone home. I don't think I ever saw her again and I forgot all about her for many years.

I thought about her tonight when I was reading on CNN about the killer male nurse who got 11 life sentences. Because that is what Terri turned out to be. When I was in college I heard on the news about a nurse in Georgia who was arrested for killing 6 people ranging in age from 3 to 73. My mom called to tell me it was Terri.

It is odd to think you have grown up knowing someone who would later be on Serial Killer Central. And it is odd to look at pictures of her, because where other people see a cold-hearted killer who brought pain and suffering to many families and cut short the lives of people who didn't deserve it, I see the girl sitting on the floor at the end of our hallway with her hair in her face, staring at her lap with some of the saddest eyes I have seen. I am not excusing anything, just saying what I see.

Ode To Tacky Christmas Past

I got an email from Jill, who was my friend for years before I ever met and married her husband's brother, updating me on Miss Kitty's Christmas display. We all lived on the same street at one time, and Miss Kitty lived in the very first house on the street. She was one of those people you describe as "quite a character". When I first moved into my house, she came knocking on the door to welcome me to the neighborhood, bearing a fruit basket as a housewarming gift. Except it wasn't a fruit basket, it was a used greasy giant plastic bowl with a .99 cent price sticker holding a bunch of near-rotten bananas. Still, it was a kind gesture. She told me her name was Miss Kitty and she gave me the lowdown on all the neighbors. Mr. Kitty, for lack of a better name, fixed lawn mowers for a living in their driveway, in between the junk cars. They kept about 15 tiny and constantly barking dogs behind a fence. This fence was beautified by the addition of plastic vines with fake roses interwoven throughout the chain links.

Miss Kitty gained her fame from the Christmas decorating spectacular that she started working on every year in October. Of course she had the required manger scene. Hers featured Jesus in a pup tent surrounded by a couple of wise men that were somehow smaller in scale than baby Jesus. A few plastic illuminated snowman stood by with the wisemen and four-feet tall candy canes flanked the entrance to the manger/tent. Straight from the New Testament, for sure. In another corner of the yard was a large illuminated plastic Santa riding in his sleigh. Santa AND his sleigh were placed on top of an old bicycle. Really, there was too much to take in, with all the lights and cleverly juxtaposed religious and North Pole figurines. A piece of plywood had John 3:16 painted on it, lest you forget the reason for the season.

Now, I am not one who should be all superior acting about Christmas decorations. When I remember Christmas trees from my childhood, I recall them as being glorious. However, when I see actual old family pictures from holidays past, I see that we really had some scraggledy-ass Charlie Brown trees decorated with tacky homemade (and partially melted) marshmallow snowmen, macaroni wreaths, and cheap plastic ornaments. The worst was the year my dad lost his patience before he could get the uncooperative tree in the stand so he made an x out of 2x4s and just nailed the tree to it. We got it up and decorated easily enough after that, but a tree without a means to receive water doesn't look so evergreen after two weeks. That Christmas morning we opened presents in front of a bunch of ornaments dangling from dead twigs, hoping Mom and Dad would keep their cigarettes far, far away from this potential O Tannenbomb. Maybe that is why my Dad and his second wife went the artificial route. One year I was visiting and he said, "Do you want us to put the tree up while you're here?" Envisioning a warm family night singing carols and stringing lights, I said that would be great. Apparently though, each year they would merely unplug their tree and store it as is until the next year. He went to the storage room, carried out the fully assembled, pre-lit AND decorated tree, plugged it in, and said, "Here we are. Isn't this nice?"

When I became a "grown-up" and had my own trees to decorate, I wanted to make sure to distance myself from all the tackiness of my childhood Christmases. Decorating my tree was a serious matter to me. Everything was color coordinated, the ornaments were tasteful and matching, the lights were white, of course. I practically diagrammed the placement of each ornament. My trees looked like they were straight out of a magazine. But this changed the year after my dad died. Suddenly I got sentimental for those long-gone tacky trees and gaudy ornaments and lights from my childhood. So I became obsessed with buying vintage ornaments on Ebay. The older, tackier, and more abused the ornaments, the more I wanted them. For a several week period, I was receiving packages daily containing ornaments that some other family had worn down from years of use or neglect. I would gleefully open packages containing elves missing noses, Santas with arms falling off, and drummer boys minus their drums. That year my tree was packed with ornaments of every size, shape, color, and theme. It was glorious, though in future years I might see pictures and reconsider this assessment.

So Jill tells me that Miss Kitty doesn't have the full display going this year. The pup tent manger is dark. Maybe she is just getting too old to deal with the hassle. Probably the people in the neighborhood are sighing with relief at escaping what is generally considered an eyesore to any neighborhood. That is what I thought when I lived there. But now it makes me kinda sad to hear, because I know to someone, Miss Kitty's yard was glorious.

Confessions of a Former Child Snoop

After returning to my current crash pad at my parents' house following a few nights visiting a friend, I noticed little clues that led me to believe somebody had been SNOOPING in my room. Not a hard one to figure out, since my 6 year old nephew Alex had been over while I was gone. The snooping gene in my family is abnormally strong. I grew up in a family where nothing was safe from being plundered by family members. As the oldest of four, my younger siblings were all up in my stuff, much to my dismay and anger. We all had our different reasons for snooping. My brother Ross mainly did it to find ways to get his older sisters in trouble. (Seven year old Ross, after a snoop attack on my room when I was 16, "Mom, what does J-I-M-B-E-A-M spell? I was just wondering, it was on a bottle under Dianne's bed. Is that a word, Mom?" He always acted clueless when he was being a tattler, disguising a cunning ability to appear as if he really didn't know he was about to get us in trouble. "Mom, when the line on the car's dashboard is on 8 and 0, is that fast or slow? I was just wondering when I saw it like that when Dianne was driving us to school today. I couldn't tell.") I am not sure what Lucia's motives were for snooping, but I know she could pick a lock with a bobby pin like nothing you've ever seen. Dana didn't snoop much- she was too busy covering up her own trail of evidence to avoid getting in trouble. The only time I know of her snooping in my stuff is when she found my diary in the 3rd grade and read the entry I wrote called "The Day Dana Peed on My Head", a dramatic recount of the time she slid down the side of Ross's rocking horse and got stuck and I tried to help her by getting on all fours under her butt to use the force of my head to free her and she was laughing so hard she wet her pants. She didn't appreciate my need to privately vent about the horror of that day, and immediately after breaking into my diary charged into the den and beat me up. So I was three times the victim- first peed upon, then violated by having my diary read, then pulverized by my tougher sister.

My own reasons for believing I had the right to go through any drawers, boxes, notebooks, or sealed letters of family members was that I was convinced that I would find the proof to back up my belief that nobody was really as they seemed. Our life down there was so oppressively boring that I had to make up excitement. I felt sure (hoped) I was going to find evidence that my mom had some kind of secret life- maybe another family on the sly, or perhaps she was secretly involved in some criminal activity. I thought I would find some evidence of Dana's secret plans to run away and get married, or to join some drug cartel, and I would get to be the one who busted her. I would go through their stuff so sure that I was about to be able to yell AHA, I knew it. Unfortunately, the truth of the matter is we were a pretty boring family, and if my family members ever did have crazy covert activities going on, I never found out about them.

I quit snooping after leaving home. I never felt the sense of entitlement to go through anyone's things outside of my family. Of course, there were a few peekings through a college boyfriend's stuff. That was when I came to realize that sometimes you are better off not knowing about covert activities. By the time I was ninteteen or twenty I was totally rehabbed from my snooping ways and to this day I am very respectful of other people's privacy. (Except for when I was wearing one sister's jacket the other day and pulled a suspicious receipt out of the pocket and my other sister and I had to take a little time to go through all the possible explanations.) Still, I recognized the signs that perhaps a certain little nephew had spent some time in my bedroom, and ran through a quick mental checklist of any possibly damaging discoveries. I think I might need to plant fake evidence of some kind . So that his career as a child snoop might be more rewarding than the one I had.

Another Entry About A Hermit

I have been going out a lot lately, which is probably a good thing for me since I have secret fears that I may one day turn into a hermit. I think it might run in my family. When I was little I was obsessed with a distant relative named Cousin Grunt who was a hermit. He lived on the same dirt road as my family and you could see his shack through the clearing of trees. I know he didn't have indoor plumbing but I am not sure about electricity. (In the list of weird relatives I found extremely interesting/frightening, he is tied up near the top of the list with Uncle Heck, who was 90-something and didn't have a nose. Or a prosthetic nose. Or a patch or bandage or anything that would have made going with my Granny to deliver his Friday night meals less traumatic for me as a 6 year old. Not far behind was Smokey, the mentally impaired alcoholic great uncle who was not as physically frightening as Uncle Heck, but would always give big drunk hugs and usually had drool down the front of his shirt. Smokey was always hitchhiking into town and my mom would make us act like we didn't see him.) Mom has explained to me that Cousin Grunt was not a hermit, just an old raging alcoholic who had killed a man in his youth and had found it hard to obtain employment after that. And his name was Runt, not Grunt. My guess is that Cousin Grunt/Runt didn't appreciate it as much as my Sunday School teacher said he would when our little class would show up unannounced to give him crafty stuff we had made for him and sing hymns and crap. I always hated when my church groups would have to go visit "shut-ins". Usually it was some ancient person in a bed with rails and a pee pot underneath. And the houses would smell bad. And we would have to sing hymns and look cute and then get into cars and drive off to the next shut-in's house. The group leaders seemed pretty pleased that we were able to brighten these poor people's day, but I always felt uncomfortable because I could tell they really didn't want us barging in. Thinking back, those group leaders had lots of bad ideas, like having us eat cold Chef Boyardee Ravioli straight out of the can so we could see how hard life was for the missionaries in Africa. I guess their intentions were good. None of this has anything to do with why I am an atheist, though.

But if I do succumb to the pull of the hermit life, and you think it would be a good idea to drop by unannounced to sing about Jesus and give me a paper cup filled with plaster and a fake flower made of pipe cleaners, just remember that I have murderers in my family tree.

Translation

One of the reasons I took a leave of absence from work to move in with my dad when he "got the cancer" a few years ago was because my step-mom was not able to communicate verbally. A stroke in her forties left her with limited use of one hand and unable to say more than a few words or phrases. Her thinking was fine- she just couldn't get it out in words. In the fifteen plus years since the stroke, she and my dad had become so synchronized that her communication disability really wasn't that big of an impediment in their relationship. To anyone else, trying to guess what she wanted to say was often like playing 20 questions (or more like 40) and usually ended with her frustratedly waving her hands and saying nevermind, one of the words she could and did say frequently. But with my dad, she would get out a sound or two and make a couple of gestures and he would be like, "Oh, I see, you want me to go plant impatiens around the mailbox and then get some ground beef out of the freezer" while we sat there dumbfounded.

But now we needed someone with two able hands to help take care of things, someone who could communicate with the rest of the family on his status. So off I headed to South Georgia. I became good at giving shots, deciphering doctor speak, learning how to hunt down the right people in hospitals, and getting someone�s affairs in order. As my dad's condition deteriorated and the toxins his tumor-ridden liver could no longer process began to poison his brain, he was no longer able to be my step-mom's mouthpiece. So that fell to me a lot of times.

When I think of events from that time, I don't arrange them chronologically by date, rather by Dad's physical condition. So this particular afternoon I am thinking of was about three weeks after he had stopped talking about how he was going to beat this disease, but about two weeks before you had to stand behind him and hook your arms around him to hold him up in front of the toilet (while looking at the ceiling to give him privacy), and about a month before the adult diapers. This was before the hospital bed was delivered, and this was when he still looked human.

I was sitting on the sofa while my Dad was in his recliner sleeping. My step-mom came in and joined us. She was looking at my dad and growing very visibly agitated and I could see some kind of explosion was coming. Then she yelled his name. Without opening his eyes, he just said, "What is it baby" and she cried, "I HATE YOU".  He said, "I'm sorry, baby". His eyes never opened throughout the entire conversation. My step-mom was crying and had no way to tell her one-time mouthpiece what she was thinking. So I stepped in, like a second grader mediating between two friends on a playground. "You're mad at him because you don't want him to be sick and you are scared of losing him". She nodded and my dad said he understood. And for the next ten minutes I was my step-mom's voice as she basically had one of her final talks with my dad that he was able to respond to lucidly. I got everything right this time, knew everything she was trying to say. And what had started off with I hate you became a very touching conversation between two people who loved each other deeply. I think hurt sometimes feels a lot like hate and we could all use someone to translate our feelings for us. I haven't stayed in contact with my step-mom, but I hope she is doing well.