it's official: hospice

My stepdad is in hospice now, in-patient. They'll keep him there 'til he's stable & comfortable. Then he'll come home to a hospital bed in the living room.

It's coming fast now.

I've watched death stalk my family -- my father, then my mother, now my stepfather -- since 2004.

My mother is still steps ahead, in a holding pattern. Her lung tumor hasn't shrunk, but it hasn't grown. There are, to our knowledge, no metastatic lesions.

Death is oh so very patient, though. It can wait as long as it takes.

And it won't take long now with my stepdad.

He was, in some ways, much more fatherly than my real father. Certainly less of a head case. I so wished he & my mother would have some good years together after she retired. But she retired a month early to have her lobectomy, then chemo, then radiation, then more chemo. That was a year and a half ago, during which time his prostate cancer metastasized to his liver, his spine, his pelvis, his jawbone.

It's the liver tumors that have accelerated things.

One of the things that resonates is what Winona Ryder as Mina says to Gary Oldman as Dracula, in Francis Ford Coppola's "Bram Stoker's Dracula".

He's about to turn her into a vampire, and then changes his mind saying he loves her too much to condemn her. She says to him,

"Take me away from all. this. death."