Diminution

Her spark is gone.  She’s a weakened shell of a person, sitting in a wheelchair, no longer complaining about the profligate use of paper towels under her roof, or the stains on the living room carpet.  Disinterested in eating much other than toast, perhaps because toast is what she remembers to ask for.  She’s always cold now, this woman who for years hasn’t had the thermostat above 60° in the winter.  And she sleeps.  For a while, she’d claim to be awake with her eyes closed – no longer.

It’s harder and harder to get her up and out of bed – besides being weak, she’s lost some ability to control her legs, and a fall the other day reinjured the ankle she’d sprained last spring.  It wasn’t even much of a fall – just a gradual guided sinking to the floor between the bed and the wheelchair – but her ankle seems to have been twisted and now it hurts.  

Fortunately, she’s not otherwise in pain.  For whatever reason, the cancer, untreated for quite some time now, is not manifesting itself via pain.  Oh it’s there, we know it’s there, it doesn’t just disappear, but it’s not hurting her, not physically anyway.  

I wonder what she knows.  She hasn’t recently said "I don’t know how much longer I’ll need to be in this hospital bed", but when she did say it, not so long ago?  She was planning to get better and move back upstairs into her own bed.  I honestly don’t know if she knows that she’s dying.  How does one know?