Guilt Guilt Guilt

Now the guilt has assaulted me.  It crept in with the stupid thought that had I been there and held her tightly, I could have kept her soul in her body.  I know that’s dumb and acknowledged that to myself, but one can’t battle emotions with intellect. 

Yesterday I got to thinking that I should never have put her on hospice.  I was thinking that she would have lived a little longer if I had actively tried to get her a “cure.”  Again, I realized intellectually that was unrealistic.  She was 90 years old with multi-system atrophy and congestive heart failure.  Even if she had stayed alive a few days longer it would have just been prolonging a non-life at the end.  Hospice was a smart move and what she would have wanted.  It would have been terrible for her to have gone into the hospital and awakened time after time not knowing where she was and sometimes not even having her usual aid or me by her side.

I felt like somebody was in my head, though, shouting at me all the things I did wrong, thought wrong and all of the ways I came up short.  I made myself so miserable that I wasn’t there with her when she passed.  It is as if my brain has forgotten that she wasn’t really there when she passed either.  Still, this awful guilt is consuming.  I didn’t think this would happen to me as I traveled down there month after month and sat by her bed and loved her.  Everybody thought I was terrific with her… that I was her “guardian angel.”  So why can’t I shake this off.

Plus, I just miss her so much.  When you’re in somebody’s life a lot and they’re in yours… the “missing them,” is so painful.  I hope nobody I love dies before me again.  As I am the oldest of all the people I love except for my brothers (and they are more fit), I calm myself by saying there is little chance of me losing someone to the point of pain in the future.  I care about my mom’s sister (my aunt) but we have never been terribly close.  I am not good with death.  I just didn’t know that.  I didn’t have any real struggles with my father’s death but, then again, he had suffered with Alzheimer’s so long that he was dead long before he died.