Is end-of-life an appropriate subject for a 94-year-old man?
The lady suggesting this topic is a True Perspective greeter and she seemed to think it was.
My first real heart-touching experience with it was losing my mother when I was an educator in Montana. My mother was in a Madison hospital and the doctor said, by phone, that she didn’t have much time left. We had three small children and we loaded the car after school to drive all night. When I got to the hospital desk, the lady at the desk told me that the children couldn’t go with us up one floor. I made a decision and took the kids up to see and be seen by their grandmother for the very last time. I was expecting the secretary to call the police and be officially charged, but she most generously did not.
My first wife - of 55 years - bore, fed and mothered those three kids, who are now a college professor in Denver, a retired Spanish teacher in Minneapolis, and a dentist in Ohio.
A brain tumor took my first wife, and I was a lost soul for more than three years.
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Then, luckily, I met a woman who suffered the loss of her husband. We met in the Unitarian Church in Duluth, discussed our parallel lives to date and ultimately decided that we’d be better as a couple rather than proceeding as loners. Now that lady is in her final days at the Superior Villa Marina.
At age 94 and alone, with a pacemaker and a new right knee and living my finale at the Superior True Perspective, yes, I think I’m prepared now for the end of life.
Bernie Hughes, Superior
