Sorry to be late....I was multitasking...
Sorry about your mom. My mom was found in the apartment at her assisted living facility four miles from me on Jan. 4.
The few weeks after that were really difficult. We didn’t know she was THAT ill, although she was failing. She was 72.
I think it’s easier when your loved one passes in the hospital. Much easier than being called to (and SEEING) the scene hours after she had gone.
But she was a nurse and the coroner was there and he was a man I knew from working in the ER at the local Trauma Center and he reminded me that Mom was a nurse and when people work in health care and see so much...they pray to go the way Mom went.
She was on the floor....but she probably just stood up, saw God’s white light and walked into his arms.
Not easy for us here to see the aftermath...but the Lord has her now.
“I think it’s easier when your loved one passes in the hosptal.”
And here in lies one of the great problems in medical costs. Very large amounts of the medical costs occur in the last 6 months of life. My mother and late husband both insisted that they did not want to die in a hospital, so I cared for them in their final months/years. In both cases there was medical supervision in that doctors agreed that nothing could be done to reverse the dying process, it could only be drawn out by tube and intravenous feeding and the like. They set me up with home nurse visits in the last weeks.
My husband was Scots/American and VERY thrifty. He did not want money he had worked for all his life to go to some hospital/doctor. He wanted it to be preserved for his children/grandchildren. For the last 3 years of his Alzheimers he was totally dependent on me as he could not go out and find his way home. We had checked on an Alzheimers nursing facility in 2001. They wanted $57,000 a year as long as he was ambulatory, and a lot more if he became bedridden. In all, our decision probably saved the family over $200,000, a fair bit of which would have been paid by health insurance.
People need to learn how to accept death and care for the ones they love. It is too easy to palm this off on an impersonal institution and let someone else pay for it.