RA>I hope your friend passes over peacefully and quickly with his loved ones
  >around him.
His family took him home AMA (Against Medical Advice), which meant they
couldn't have hospice care.  But a community nurse got involved, did
some behind the scenes changes, and finally did get him into the
home hospice program. He's still alive now; or I assume so, since I
haven't been called; and I am the phone contact person to call everyone
else when he dies.  Death *is* imminent, however.  I will be over there
later to do a shift of sitting with him.  This being with him, and being
with his family, has been a deeply spiritual experience for me, perhaps
because there is so much love surrounding him, perhaps because he is
himself such a deeply loving person.  Even now, in his dying, he is
reaching out in love to those he has long loved.  One of his
grandchildren, who flew in from California to be with him, talked about
how watching a loved one die, although physically and emotionally
exhausting, is, nevertheless, a new education in loving. She is right.
As I sit with him, and with his family, I feel honored to been included
so deeply in their lives.  They have been a family to me in the long
years of living far away from my own family.  Rob is really traumatized
by this.  He loved this man as deeply as he loved his grandfather.  Rob
refuses to go and see him; to say good-bye to him.  He is afraid that if
he goes he will remember him as a helpless stroke victim, and not as the
vital energetic man he has known and loved all his life. Mario and I are
accepting Rob's decision.  Perhaps, for him, that would be true.  I
think, though, that he is simply escaping the intensity of the
experience.  And that is OK, too.  The last four years have been very
hard on Rob.  He has seen, during that time period, the death of a
sister, two cousins, a grandmother, and a couple of friends.  This is
one more loss for him.
                  Sondra
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 þ SLMR 2.1a þ I'm dancing as fast as I can.
--- Opus-CBCS 1.7x via O_QWKer 1.1
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