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.