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Last night my best friends dad died. He had cancer and had been in and out of hospital for a few years and it was obvious he wasn't coming out this last time. I'd known him for 25 years and he was a lovely bloke, I'm sad he's gone. His name was Clifford.
When my friend called me to tell me the news, about 2 hours after the event, we were talking about what it had been like for the last few days in the hospital with him drifting in and out of consciousness and lucidity, how he could still find the energy to be funny, how he was surrounded by family and so much love right up to the time he went. His wife and two of his three daughters were present when he simply stopped breathing.
His hands changed first, his fingernails looked wrong and then so did his whole hands, then his arms. This, apparently, was followed by the "let's keep touching him to see what bits might still be warm game". I told her that her family is weird. She laughed, a little sadly.
I've never known anyone that's died before. I've never seen a dead person, never been to a funeral. I've certainly never played the Find The Warm Bits game with someone who wasn't breathing and didn't consider it to be foreplay.
I can see that it was a way of not wanting to let go. I can imagine the scene being very loving, it's just that my friend has a warped way of putting things and that framing it within the context of a "game" is just her way of being able to describe it to me without collapsing into tears. Still, it got me wondering.
Are there any other "games" you or anyone you know has "played" with a dead person? What ways do we have to understand and cope with this kind of loss? It is usual to explore the physical manifestations of death like that? |
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