We got my mother back to Garden Manor today, but now in the skilled nursing unit.  Many of her friends (staff) from her old unit came by to visit her.  It was the most animated I’d seen her–she smiled broadly, like her old self.  Then she seemed to return to the place she’s been occupying more and more, somewhere deep within.  She sleeps a lot.  She’s having increasing difficulty swallowing.  At times we can hear her lungs softly rattling.

Hospice will be in tomorrow.  I am still second-guessing myself about the decisions I’m making.  My mother did leave a living will, which helps, but having to reiterate that she is not to be resuscitated forces us to articulate.  To say of someone you love: No CPR if she goes into cardiac arrest–What kind of love is that?  Sometimes I hear myself saying: “What would we rescue her for?  Another few years of miserable confusion?”  But that isn’t the reason.  I would keep her going no matter how confused she was.  I’m intuiting that it’s Time.  To everything there is a season, as Ecclesiastes wrote.

“He hath made every thing beautiful in his time: also he hath set the world in their heart, so that no man can find out the work that God maketh from the beginning to the end.”