Earlier yesterday evening sitting at the kitchen table, my mom was making proclimations that “tonight was going to be the night”. One thing is almost for sure, when my mom makes proclimations, there is a good to excellent chance that they will not come true. I think it’s her way of trying to control the uncontroabale. I said, outing my crunchy, granola, hippy side, “why don’t we all sleep downstairs around Bob”. I thought it would be good since my mom was thinking about sleeping on the couch anyway. With the bedroom air conditioner going upstairs, and the classical music playing downstairs, the safety system of the baby monitor setup wasn’t really working. My mom wasn’t for the family love in, but my aunt said she really liked it saying that she hopes that all of her friends and family would be around her when it was her time. My sister agreed and my mom said okay.

I thought the matter was settled, but as the night wore on, everyone got tired and wandered away to separate bedrooms. So at one, I scrounged up a flat pillow and a a horse blanket from the upstairs closet and started to fluff up the couch. Bob stirred and coughed. I went over to see if he needed anything. His eyes were bright. He spoke to me with some force in his voice said he was thirsty. Just a few hours before, we thought he would never speak again. I went to get him some water and wake up my mom who I thought would want to talk to him. She and my aunt came down and we spent the next two hours feeding him ice chips and glasses of water. He said it was the most delicious thing he had ever tasted and couldn’t get enough. He was actually had enough energy to be “a bit of a pill” as my aunt would say. He wanted to hold the water cup himself and my mom wouldn’t let him. He almost had enough energy to launch into one of his familiar diatribes spurring my mom into her own set of reactions.

But, in the end, it was a cup of water, that needed to be held, and it was.

When my mom first came down and he wanted ice she said, “Cynthia, go crush up some ice, there’s a hammer in the utility room”. So for all of yesterday, and today I was and am the ice chip maker. For the first four times I got a dish rag full of ice, folded it up like a hobo sack and bashed it into little pieces at two am on the utility room floor. BAM!!!! BAM!!!! BAM!!!! On the fifth trip as I had the hammer hovering, I thought about the high power blender in the garage less than four feet away from me. It’s set up in the garage and not the kitchen because of the noise. I crushed the ice in four seconds. I walked into the living room with the blender full of ice. We all laughed.

Finally at three, he said he was ready to sleep. We made him comfortable and then sat together in the kitchen for a while before we went to bed.

Today, he’s been talking and alert for long stretches during the day. It’s a strange experience for everyone. He hasn’t eaten for three days and says he’s not hungry. He hasn’t taken any of his pain meds for at least as long maybe longer. He says he’s not in pain, and we are all grateful for that. We have the morphine kit in the fridge if and when he needs it.