I'm composing offline again, in the smoking area of the Richard L. Jones, Jr. International Airport. The smoking area reminds me of a bus station. I imagine that I stick out here, with my laptop and my black Chucks, but I'm kidding myself...I'm just like the rest of these bozos.

What I hadn't anticipated about my aunt's deathwatch was her total lack of lucidity. She lies there, frequently sleeping and grunting in her sleep. When she wakes, her eyes are either slit & sleepy & looking at nothing in particular, or they're wide & startled, as if she'd been physically shaken awake. In this state, every return to consciousness is a surprise; she's surprised by who is there and who is not, by the slow march of shadows & sunbeams across the lemon yellow walls and by the fact that, for all her fugue state, she is still there to regain consciousness.

I came to Oklahoma hoping to set things right with my aunt. I wanted to tell her that I was sorry for letting my student loans slip, for letting the same creditors who hound me hound her. I wanted to apologize for not keeping in closer touch, for letting my relationships in Oklahoma, which once were very strong, just slip away. I wanted to explain to her that...well, that I felt she was disappointed in me. Here she was with a good & loving marriage, one that has seen her through not just one, but now two bouts with cancer not just unscathed, but strengthened. She had followed her vocation (and I mean vocation in the most primal sense of the word: a calling, probably from some power much larger and stronger than herself) without swerving or deviating. She became a pillar in this small, rural community. She remained true to herself, to her family, to her ideals and was recognized throughout her surroundings for it. She was important to so many people. And she made a fucking difference in their lives.

Once, I know it, she had the same hopes for me. Me, a 34-year-old assistant manager of a videogame store trailing a string of broken relationships behind me like Godzilla festooned with burning bridges. Me, who had dropped off the face of the Earth and was holed up in a studio apartment in Milwaukee, screaming at his cat for tearing down his connection to Final Fantasy XI.

I wanted to apologize for what I had become. And I wanted her to tell me that I would be all right.

I'm composing this entry offline. The connection here is amazingly flaky, so I'm unable to access the wireless that's supposedly available. Currently, the deathwatch is on night shift, which means there's a hospice nurse sitting with my aunt. My uncle is trying to get some sleep. I'm still here, instead of back in the suite we've rented at my grandmother's retirement community, because my uncle's sister had to go back to Woodward; she has an audit at her job tomorrow, and on Tuesday her 25-year-old daughter will be sworn in to the Oklahoma Bar. I can't stand to think of my uncle here alone, although I'm not capable of the non-stop assistance his sister was providing him.

The most important reason that things here are so much worse than I imagined they'd be is the condition of my aunt herself. My uncle said that she'd gone downhill pretty rapidly since moving to hospice care, and from what I've seen, he wasn't fucking around. Apparently, up until she came home from the hospital on Friday, she had been very lucid, capable even of walking fair distances with some assistance. All that's changed, now. Now, the longest distance she's moved in two days has been from the hospital bed that's been installed in her playhouse to the portable commode at her bedside. This afternoon, even that mobility became unnecessary; she began retaining fluid to such a large degree that she's been given a catheter.

The lack of mobility doesn't really surprise or startle me; I'd pretty much figured she'd be bedridden. I was also reasonably prepared for her appearance; she has the shiny, yellowing skin and facial gauntness that the movies actually capture pretty accurately. Her hair is sparse & close cropped, her cheekbones are high & sharply defined and her eyes are sunken back in their sockets. Her skull is right there, plain & simple and yet almost obscenely intimate. That sort of closeness, where a mere observer can see what should by all rights be safely and invisibly giving structure to her healthy & living face, can see without any imagination the way death is whittling her down to the bare & barely living structure of life, is too close for anyone other than a lover, a mother or a doctor.

Yesterday's post was brief, and sort of melodramatic. I'm sorry about that. We had to get my grandmother back to take her medication before she totally blew her cork.

That's the first thing here that's much worse than I imagined: my grandmother is no longer suffering from a bit of senile dementia, she's got full-blown Alzheimer's. She thinks I'm about 9 feet tall and that she still lives in Pennsylvania. She talked to her younger sister, who arrived yesterday for this deathwatch, for about 20 minutes and didn't realize who the woman was. At all. She kept saying, "You & I must be related." At first we thought she was joking. It soon became apparent that she was not.

The worst thing is that, up until right this fucking minute, my grandmother has no idea that her daughter was dying. And when I say "right this fucking minute," I'm not kidding. The irony here is that the only place on my Aunt & Uncle's property which has internet connectivity is the finished outbuilding referred to as Donna's Playhouse. This is the addition my Aunt had built as her private sanctum, where she could do her researches and pursue her projects undisturbed. This is her favorite place. And she's dying in it. Not 12 feet from where I'm sitting.

So, while I was writing the paragraph about my grandmother's Alzheimer's disease, my grandmother was sitting at my Aunt's bedside, staring at her. My greataunt, the very sister my grandmother didn't recognize yesterday, was telling me about bluegrass artists she used to go see in Radio Park as a teenager. My grandmother very suddenly & viciously said "Shhhhhh!" Then she stood, moved towards my aunt and began to shake and cry.

The synapses fire slower, and at random intervals, but they still work. She got it quicker than it would take an infinite number of monkeys to come up with Hamlet's "To be, or not to be" soliloquy. But not much.

My god, it's so much worse than I expected.

My aunt, who lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma, is dying.

I haven't spoken to her in quite some time, because she co-signed for a few of my student loans, and I haven't always been able to keep up with them the way I should. This embarrasses me, and I can't stand embarrassment; it dissolves 20 years of growth & learning and turns me into a puzzled & frightened teenager who's ready to burst into tears at a moment's notice.

So I avoided her for a few years. And she developed cancer of a particularly nasty sort. At that point it had been so long since I'd spoken to her that I was embarrassed, so I avoided her, because as we now know, I can't stand embarassment.

Now she's dying. She's coming home from the hospital to start hospice care. She's an M.D. She knows what's coming, and what's best for her. She doesn't want the entire family to trek out to Tulsa to see her if she isn't dying. So the word's gone out, and we're all on our way.

Everybody except my brother, whose son, Lucas, will be born any minute.

I will meet my sister's son, Ezra, at the death watch for my aunt. I will see my grandmother, emeshed in a web of dementia that's left her barely recognizable, for the first time in years. And I will watch my mother, the youngest, outlive her sister and become the only surviving child of the three born to my grandmother & grandfather. Then, I imagine, my grandmother will turn into a cloud of gypsy moths and flutter away, leaving my mother alone.

Honestly, I don't know what to expect.