Reply #42: Same from me, SG.

[Berry Cool]

to you and to Bot for being so goldenhearted also.

I know so many of us here have either been through or are going through this slow process of watching a beloved parent suffer and possibly die. As you know, I was spared all this with my mother. My mother's loss was sudden and shocking and agonizing, but if there was one silver lining to it, it was that my siblings and I did not have to make life-and-death decisions about it and we did not have to watch her suffer for a long time.

However, we still have our father, and that's a whole different matter. Right now we're not geographically close to him and if he becomes critically ill again (he's already survived one heart attack) he still has a wife capable of making decisions for him or with him based on his desires. But if anything happens to her first (and she's already beaten back cancer once), the decisions will fall into the hands of his children: children to whom he was not the best or most generous of fathers in their childhood, but who was making sincere efforts to make up for that in their adulthood. And who, in the end, is still their father.

I have no idea what kind of mess that would create if it were to happen. No idea at all. None of us lives anywhere near him and none of us could just afford to go there and be with him if such a thing were to happen, because we have jobs (except me) and no spouses or savings to financially support us if we had to quit or take an unpaid leave to be with him. (Even I couldn't do it, because of course leaving the state to live elsewhere would be a violation of my unemployment insurance conditions. How can I tell my state--even while technically receiving federal rather than state compensation--that I'm making a good-faith effort to find work if I go live in another state?) And I don't know what kind of health care he has for himself based on the small businesses he has operated for years. We would have to find out, and make out for ourselves how it all works.

Wouldn't it be wonderful if we didn't have to worry about that, because we knew every bill was covered? What if it's not? What would we have to do?

God only knows.

I feel for all of you who have been through this and are going through it. And I only wish Congress could hear us, and care.