The Dreaded Sentence

Later today, I am going to attend yet another funeral. Sigh. My great-aunt's husband only outlived her by a little more than a month and died in the nursing home where the two of them had spent the last few years of their lives. I visited him on Sunday, the last day he was alive and although it's easy to say this in retrospect and he had been on the edge several times these last weeks, I did feel that he had only waited for me to come and say goodbye to him before he would quietly make his exit. 

My great-aunt got married (for the first time) at the age of sixty and her husband whom she met at a spa resort was a widower who did not have any children or other living relatives. When I visited him these last weeks it struck me how utterly awful it must be to be old and alone. Needless to say there's no guarantee that your offspring will be nice and caring when you're old and gray, but chances are that they will at least turn up at your bedside with a bunch of flowers out of a sense of duty. 

Although the old couple shared a room, they did not actually interact much at all the last months of their lives. Dementia and loss of hearing are a bad combination. They both had their way of escaping into made-up dream worlds. My uncle dreamed up elaborate love-trysts involving the female nurses who allegedly were all madly in love with him and seriously considering to leave their virile husbands for an octogenarian with no teeth and a colostomy bag. He pestered Chiquita's Dad to keep him in pocket money for tipping the staff and otherwise was utterly hooked on the Nimm Zwei sweets I did not dare show up without.

Ever since he almost died the very day of his wife's funeral my heart rate quickened every time I saw my uncle's (=Chiquita's Dad, who was the couple's custodian) name on my phone's display. This Monday morning, I got to hear the dreaded sentence that inevitably is the intro to bad news and that had brought sad tidings three times already in the last 6 months, "I have to tell you something sad."

I really hope it will be a long time until I get to hear it. Black seriously does not suit me.