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So, you will have noticed that there was none of the planned posting this week.

This is (in large part, though not entirely) due to the fact that I have spent much of the past week watching my grandfather dying. It's not really unexpected - he is very old and has well outlived his own expectations; and he's been losing functionality at an increasing rate for the past year. He's been ready to go, and while I don't think anyone can ever be ready for a loved one to go, we've all known it was coming, sooner rather than later. But it is still far from easy to watch it happen, and watch what it's doing to everyone else in the family, and if I am being even flakier than usual for awhile, this is probably why. (And yes, it did take me most of a week to get to the point where I could say, yes, this is actually a real reason to be getting less done, it is not just that I fail as a person.)

It seems like half my reading list is going through something similar at the moment. It is hard, and I have been sending good thoughts your way even when I haven't been writing any; I am no better at dealing with the expected courtesies and emotions and sympathies when it's me who's grieved than when it's someone else, so I would just as soon take good wishes as read, and move on.

I'm leaving comments open, though, because there are a couple related things I wanted to say, since I seem to have a little bit of an audience here, I might as well use it. One of them is, thank God for advance directives (also known as living wills.) Pop-pop having one is the difference between him living on for maybe futile years while under, basically, torture, and him dying comfortably and naturally the way he wanted to.

So, PSA: Look up your goverment's rules on Advance Directives, and get one for yourself, and talk to your loved ones about getting them, too. Even if you don't have the resources to do the legal paperwork, figure out who your next-of-kin/power-of-attorney would be in that situation, and at least talk to them informally about what you would want if you could no longer make your own end-of-life medical decisions, or put a letter in with your other important paperwork. Just knowing whether or not something is wanted can make so much difference.

(And on a related note, thank God for socialized medicine, even the stunted and handcuffed system we have in the US. If we didn't have the assurance that Medicare/Medicaid would cover everything? If we'd been jumping through hoops for a private insurance plan that many of the providers weren't familiar with? If we hadn't been able to put him in a wonderful and well-funded hospice without worrying about where the money was coming from? ~~if we hadn't already jumped through all the stupid hoops to make sure medicare *would* pay when my grandmother was dying~~ - it would all suck so much more. )

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*hugs*

Strength to you both, and thanks for the reminder.

You can find basic forms for many states online for advance directives and similar stuff like living wills.

Yeah, I was just looking that up after I posted! This site seems to have links basic forms for all the US states, which is nice. I've had an informal statement stuck in with my (also informal) will for a while now, but my state's official form is so easy that I think I will probably just print it & fill it out tomorrow. (Also I *really* like that my state's form has a "these people are allowed to visit me in the hospital no matter what" option without having to prove a relationship. yay!)

The ones for my state only required an unrelated witness's signature so I printed them at work and had a coworker sign them. It took about half an hour to do the advance directive, the living will, and the regular will naming my GF in charge of my estate. Easy-peasy and it was good to know she had that in her purse last time I was in the hospital.

Urgh. Is there, like, a federal version? If you file it in one state do you have to change it when you move to a different one? Because I am 95% sure that I will still be domiciled in MA a year from now, and beyond that, who knows.

So if I do any of this any time soon it will probably be an informal letter on my laptop or in my bag o' paperwork.

I am not a person who gives legal advice.

But I think, in most if not all US states, anything that declares what it is and has two or three independent witnesses will still work, even if it's not the state's official form. Anyway, it would be better than nothing.

I SO hear you on advance directives; my dad dying would have been a zillion times harder if I'd actually had to make real decisions, but his advance directive was so clear about what he wanted that all I had to do was sign some forms.

So...anyway, I empathize on all counts, including what to say to other people and how to take what they say.

Yeah, I'm one of those people who wants to respond with Practical Stuff! So... advance directives it is!

I am so, so glad we had it (and so glad everyone else in the older generation of my family already made sure they had one), and I wish more people knew how important it can be.

I really need to set mine up; after all, I could get hit by a bus. I trust my mom to make the decisions I would, but it's a way to remove burden from the family, so.

Sending you good thoughts.

My mom has an advance directive, and with the heart attack she's started thinking about pulling it out and polishing it up.

It's one of those things you're probably never too young to have (like a will), but it's still really hard for me to seriously consider my own mortality at this point.

It's almost more important for young people, I think, because if someone *does* end up having to make those decisions, it's *so much harder* if it's someone "going before their time" or whatever the euphemism is. :/

I here you about the mortality thing, though - I tend to mess with my end-of-life papers when I'm feeling depressed and worthless. It is probably not the healthiest thing to do, but hey, at least the end result is that I have them. (I haven't got them legally witnessed yet, though, because as you said, there's a percept that young people aren't supposed to think about that sort of thing. I almost think we should have a will-and-living-will witnessing party for everyone in our cohort, or something.)

It took us a LONG time to bring ourselves around to doing all the paperwork, even after the kids were born and we knew we really, really had to do it. I think the wills and advance directives sat on my desk for most of a year (though I had done living wills before I went into the hospital with each of the babies). The lawyer told me that was not anything like the longest they'd seen someone take.

Edited 2010-04-06 17:02 (UTC)

Oh, you have all my sympathies, not least because we're doing the same thing (in very, very slow motion) ourselves right now.

And I have absolutely been doing the "oh crap I am such a failure I'm not getting anything done" routine myself, even though my ticked-off to-do lists tell me I'm full of crap. I think it's because I'm really thinking "I'm not fixing the thing I really want to fix, which is this person who's dying; wow, I fail."

Which...well, yeah, we all fail at that.

I had been on such a roll of actually ticking things off the to-do lists and getting stuff done! Now ... not so much. Even if looking at it objectively I haven't been all that much less productive, the stuff I've been doing is not the stuff I feel like I *should* be doing.

Which, yes, what I want to be able to do right now is undoable. ):

Medicare's willingness to deal with End of Life care gracefully is the only thing that made a shittastic situation slightly less shittastic for us. Knowing that we didn't have to worry about whether or not we could pay for what we needed to do to make things... slightly less unbearable.

Take everything else as read.

I was just old enough when we went though this with my grandmother that I remember the hassle involved in getting coverage for her long nursing home stay; either the processes have really improved, or we only had to do it once, because the financial end of this, at least, has been fairly painless (unlike the rest of it.)

And he ended up in a really, really nice facility, too. Which there is no way we could have afforded otherwise.

I am not sure if it is an option or you are there yet, but I am also extremely grateful for hospice. Made a huge difference for my grandfather.

::hugs::

Yes! The difference in getting him in to the hospice was amazing, and the hospice itself was great. I am so glad we had that option.

I'm very glad. It's rough.

I hope things are going as well as they can go.

I will keep those in mind. My grandma has something like that planned, herself. Which is for the best with exactly how much equipment she was going to need to be hooked up to when her horrible smoke-damaged lungs give out.

... :( grandma

Ack. I forgot to say, I'm sorry about your grandpa. Even if it's time, it's never easy.

Edited 2010-04-06 23:52 (UTC)

:( I hope your grandma's situation works out with minimum terribleness. It sounds like things are in place already to help, anyway.

My grandfather smoked constantly for 80 years straight, and died of something completely unrelated. The people at the hospital said he had the lungs of a man thirty years younger. We are not sure how this is possible.

Lucky! Grandma can't go anywhere without her oxygen tank these days. Of course, she does take it off to go outside to smoke from time to time. *facepalm*

These things are such an incredible drain on spoons, and so stressful, even when they go comparatively easy. I'm glad for you and your grandpa that he is in a good facility, and you have my total sympathy. *hugs*

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