This is all too true:
... it's getting very costly to live this way. Ironic, to do all yourself on a nice piece of property will take all the money you have.
To have land, to own a house, a home - this is something many of take for granted.
And to have a LAKE - a home on a lake!
To swim every day as your aunt did, up until age 90 - did she really? In New York state? Did she have an indoor pool too?
What a woman!
If we live on in spirit, I'm calling on Aunt Jane.
All you beautiful souls who've gone before us: come live in me, dwell in me, or hey, just hang out with me a few minutes each day. Can you smell the lilacs and see dew drops glistening in the morning sun, if you pop in for a visit with me?
Do I sound like I'm coming unhinged?
My dad's demise has been long and oh, so drawn out, but this week, he seems to be on his way out of this life, perhaps sooner rather than later; and even though he was about as lovable as your spinster aunt, even if he was sometimes not a kind or gentle father, he was MY dad, and there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth and my heart will ache for this man.
I hope your aunt stayed mostly intact until the end. You mention hospice. (Cancer?)
Dad has leg ulcers (who knew such a thing existed) that leak...
Oh the indignity of old age!
Your Minotaur story (prompt: the rowboat was leaking) - the woman on the boat feeling her age - oh man.
She went to the Y when the lake was too cold. She was always the first one into the lake in the spring, and the last one out in the fall. Pretty amazing really.
Goodness no! You sound like the healthiest among us, able to bring the "dead" (whatever that is) back to life (whatever that is).
Oh no! You do not need another loss so soon! But there will be relief. I hope you let yourself feel that. It really helped me to know that I would not have to be a part anymore of Niko's suffering, that his suffering had ended. Of course, I miss the happiness he had, and he might have had, had he regained his health. That is the toughest thing - missing stuff that never even happened.
Jane ran a stop sign at the corner of Dunning and Koon, an intersection she had driven through countless times before with a proper stop. During the ER visit they found pancreatic cancer. She didn't live long after that, a couple months. I often wonder how much the knowledge of the cancer hadn't really hastened her death. She took very few meds until that accident. The drugs are killing us, not the illnesses.