Intimations of mortality

On Last Week Tonight last night, John Oliver, on the record as not being a fan of the Royal Family, made a quip about Britain being bowled over because "a 96-year-old woman died of natural causes".

I am a fan of John Oliver, so I wasn't particularly bothered by this statement, much like I think arresting Scottish protesters for holding up placards about abolishing the monarchy during the Queen's funeral procession is overkill.  Their protests may not be in particularly good taste, but it's their right, and hauling them off to jail is pretty much against what the Queen stood for, isn't it?

But I recalled the Oliver quip this morning when a "retweeted" "thread" showed up on my Twitterfeed:
 

What can we learn from the death of the #Queen?

The world has watched her live through the process of #OrdinaryDying, and yet dying went unspoken, un-named.

Let's notice what nobody mentioned: we all saw the Queen going through the stages of ordinary dying.

A thread..

1/ pic.twitter.com/5bYoZIXUvq

— Kathryn Mannix (@drkathrynmannix) September 11, 2022

This stopped me in my tracks.

If you follow the link you can read the whole thread, which consists of twelve tweets, from Dr Mannix, who is a retired palliative care doctor and author -- a thanatologist, if you will.

I made the mistake of not "liking" it or bookmarking it on my phone; I was at Demeter's, doing her laundry and waiting for her to wake up.

Twitter is like a rolling, roiling river of comments, smart remarks, photos, "threads", and memes, so when I went to look for the thread half an hour later, it had been swept away by other items.  I only knew that the reason I'd seen it in the first place is that the Resident Fan Boy's second cousin once removed, a doctor herself whose physician husband wrote a bestseller about his own impending death, had retweeted it.

After nearly an hour at my home computer, doing every search I could think of on Twitter, I simply entered a few keywords into Google, and there it was.

Two tweets hit me hard:

The changes began slowly.
Initially, we realised that she was less energetic year by year.
This is the stage of dying when life expectancy is usually still measured in years.

After Prince Philip died she was noticeably more tired, her public appearances less frequent, her energy less reliable. Losing weight, walking with a stick: changing month by month, a stage that usually indicates life expectancy measured in months.

I'm a witness to my mother's final years, maybe months, according to Dr. Mannix - although Demeter has used a stick for years, and her weight fluctuates.  However, I do recognize the signs.

Years ago, I joined Victoria Hospice as a volunteer, for two reasons:  I realized in my late teens, that death was something no one acknowledged, even in a time where all topics were supposedly no longer taboo; and Demeter had brought my grandmother to live in Canada, and I knew I would be facing her death soon.  (It was over a decade later.)

It's been years since my time with the hospice, and I'm out of practice.  I do remember, that when people I knew came to the hospice to die - Victoria being not a particularly large city - that I could tell when the end was near when I entered the room and had trouble recognising them.  Not due to disfigurement, you understand, but when people are nearing death, they stop looking like themselves.  It's hard to explain, if you haven't experienced this, but more than once, I quickly checked the name tag on the door to assure myself I had the right room.

The other thing I remember is that health professionals working with the dying have a reason for not giving estimates of the time left.  We would have patients who were with us for months, despite appearing very weak and ill, and others, alert and ambulatory when I came in for my weekly shift, would be gone by the time I arrived for the next one.

However, this Twitter thread has reeled me in, and I will be paying closer attention to what Demeter says and doesn't say, plus what she does and doesn't do.

Dr Mannix concludes:

Dying in plain sight, camouflaged by briefings about 'mobility issues' and medical advice to 'rest.' Because like anyone else, the Queen was entitled to some privacy about her health, and to die away from the public gaze.

But we all saw the process.

Rest in peace, Ma'am.

So John Oliver was right.  A 96-year-old woman died of natural causes, as we watched.  Because she was a privileged person, she died prepared and supported.

I know not the time, but I'm on alert.