Deeny’s mother was first diagnosed with breast cancer in 2010 and, while treatment worked at first, the cancer returned and spread to her bones, lungs and liver. When she decided that she no longer wanted to continue treatment – “Just let me go home to die” – Deeny took a leave of absence from his job to care for his mother full-time.
In the article, Deeny writes about the hospice care that his mother received at home. He describes how, with “astonishing speed”, they converted her bedroom to an at-home nursing facility and the variety of ways the nursing staff provided practical and emotional support for him and his mother, right to the end.
He writes: “What the hospice did was provide her with was comfort and dignity in her last days. Becoming bedridden is possibly the most disempowering thing that can happen to a person, but choosing to make it your bedroom you die in and not a nursing home returns a little bit of that lost agency. At home she was able to have as many visitors as she wanted, whenever she wanted them, and family and old friends filled her room with laughter, telling stories about growing up in West Philadelphia.”
Deeny also writes about his drug addition and how, when his father was dying from cancer in 2003, he took some of his father’s medication – behaviour which still haunts him. Despite the length of time he has been in recovery, Deeny writes about the challenges of having to manage and administer his mother’s medication: “As a recovering drug addict, even a decade away from my last high, it was incredibly triggering to rummage through such a stash to see what it contained.”
Deeny also touches on his mother reluctance to take her medication – in part because of his drug problems: “The pain caused by my drug problems combined with her Old World stoicism turned my mom into a staunch teetotaler suspicious of any substance that brought relief… No matter how little the pain medications available to her resembled heroin, it was too close for her comfort.”
Read ‘Hospice for My Mother, as an Addict’ on The Atlantic website.
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