Oh that smell...
Some time shortly after I went sober Spouse and I moved home to help take care of my parents. My Sibling had recently moved out into a full care facility so that he could enjoy some freedom of life after 30+ years at home.
Since then I've begun to feel like a psychopomp in training.
This all probably started much longer ago when I was about 14 and my family took in my dying great aunt so that we could house her and bring in hospice for her and let her go comfortably rather than in a hospital or care facility. As a young bookworm, my parents bribed me to sit with Aunt F by giving me new books to read and leaving me to read as long as I was sitting near her. It didn't seem odd to me at the time (new books, hey!) but in retrospect, I don't think it's something that any of my peers did. When she did pass it seemed fairly easy for her, and the Hospice folks took care of everything. EVERYTHING. Hospice rocks. So simple for me.
My Sibling's body started breaking down and I just happened to be with him in hospital when he passed. That was strange, but I let the nurse know and she brought in the doctor. Then I called home and my parents came and Mom totally freaked out right there in the room in front of the doctor and the chaplain and everyone and I thought Dad was going to force choke her with his mind. Minus the rest of the family drama, his passing was very quiet and pleasant and respectful. Apparently very easy for him and very simple for me.
Dad went at the beginning of this year. He'd had a cancer diagnosis and they took out one of his lungs. About a week after the operation his body started to fail. I got him into bed and asked him if I could take him to the hospital. He said, “I don't want to go in there.” So I kept him comfortable and he excused himself quietly while I was out of the room checking on Mom.
Mom, who by this point was full into dementia, had decided she wouldn't sleep with that strange man who is not her husband, and was sleeping on the couch. Once I noticed Dad was dead, I sat up in the living room all night to prevent her from waking up and wandering in. Recognize him or not, finding a corpse in a bed is not pleasant for anybody and given her reaction to Sibling's passing, I didn't want to listen to it. I turned off his electric blanket, opened the windows some, and sent our Funeral Director an email. “Like, honey, give me a call when you get into work. He's in a very stable condition. I want to get a cousin over to take Mom out for coffee before you come in and she gets confused and upset.” It went very smoothly. It seemed easy for Dad. Everyone was great. Reasonably simple for me.
About a week ago Mom began to fail seriously. She'd already been refusing to eat solid food for some months, but had been doing very well on liquid meals. Last week she became unable to rise without going into vasovagal synocope in a very dangerous and messy kind of way. This was unpleasant, messy, and dangerous. Also, I cannot stress the messy nearly enough. We shifted to full time bed care.
Thanks to previous experience with Sibling, Aunt F, and Dad, I've got some pretty good bed care skills. Position changes, range of motion exercises, hygiene, all that good stuff. Also, I can order hospital grade care supplies online and have them delivered! Fantastic!
Things are going pretty well. I managed to gauge the last day that she would have any possible coherence and get her closest relatives in who would want to say farewell. I even got them in individually and spaced out through a day. We even got the house cleaned up and smelling pretty good.
Thing is, I knew that day was coming because of the smell.
That smell.
I can't even call it a smell. It's a pong. It's an essence of badness. It doesn't flow into the nose so much as press against the whole face and sink into the mucus membranes and permeate the skin and gurgle down the back of the sinuses and the throat.
I am so happy that I have left all social media except for mastodon and this collection of essays. My every post would be either a joke in horrible horrible taste making light of biological functions or complaining about the smell.
Spouse sympathizes with my reaction to the smell, but thinks maybe I am a little sensitive to it. Well, I am. Turns out that, similar to the way that some people taste the soap of cilantro, some people have a much higher sensitivity to the scents associated with death. There's a neat little genetic thing that increases reaction to those smells and can also signal a higher chance of having a personality disorder. I'm not saying that I slapped a copy of a scientific paper on the topic along with a list of my diagnoses on Spouse's desk, but I may have sent a URL or two and the statement, “This smell is not bothering me because I'm crazy and I'm not crazy because of the smell, but I am bothered, I am crazy, and the two have a scientifically plausible connection.”
And, you know, I just needed to complain about this in a reasonably safe place. I've found something that really does help. It's called Bye Bye Odor. What you want to shop for is anything labeled “ostomy room deodorizer” It smells sickly sweet at first, but does a surprisingly good job at neutralizing the smell or possibly anesthetizing my senses. The mild weather is helping, too, as I can have the windows open and fans on.
See, I've almost got myself talked around to the, “It's not that bad” stage of coping with bad things through essaying about them.
I'm tired, and I'm stressed, and I'm having emotions that I don't have space or time to decompress as I'd prefer. My relatives tell me I'm doing a good job, but when they say that their tone of voice sounds like it's heavy with guilt that they're not doing more or shame that they fear they wouldn't be able to do it. Maybe some fear that nobody is going to be there for them in this way when they go.
So, I guess it's time to be patient with myself and my own impatience and irritability and tiredness. It's a great day for the stupid seasonal time change. This essay isn't going to have a clean little wrap up at the end of it. This isn't really a complete processing essay, it's more like a scream into the void. But the void is warm, and has cookies.