William Earl Milligan

1915 – 2004

    On June 9, 2004 my father died. He was 89. 

    For the first 87 years of his life he was in relatively good health. But he started complaining that his legs were feeling weak. He would go for morning walks, and had to start using a cane. But he got steadily worse and we got a walker for him.

    A few months before he died, I got a call from my mother at 4 in the morning that he had sat down in the bath tub to wash his feet and couldn't get up. (Both he and my mother were early risers.) I drove to their house to help get him out of the tub.
 
    Another time I had to leave work because he had slid down in the recliner he was sitting in and couldn't get back up.
 
    The final straw came when he fell and split his head open. He was taken to the hospital and it took sixteen staples to close the wound. Fortunately, he wasn't seriously hurt, but it was then that my mother realized that there was no way she could get him up if he continued to fall. So we had him put into a nursing facility.

    It was located close enough that my mother could drive over once or twice a day to check on him and to make sure he was eating (she was 88 at the time).
 
    He was undergoing physical therapy to try to build up the strength in his legs, but he only got steadily worse. Eventually it got to the point that he was having trouble eating. He said he had no appetite, and then could not even swallow. So we made the decision to have a feeding tube inserted into his stomach.  

    After this was done, we knew he wasn't going to get any better, so we called Hospice. We had him taken back to the nursing home. He never woke up from the surgery.  

    On June 9th, about 3:15 in the afternoon, I got a call from the nursing home that he had died. So I left work to go to my mother's to tell her and my sister, who was visiting from Massachusetts, that he had passed away. I then called a funeral home to have his body picked up. And then I went to the nursing home just to see him one more time.  

    The official cause of death was lung cancer. But what killed him was that a bit of the "mass" had traveled from his lung, settled into the base of his brain, and slowly took away his motor functions starting by weakening his legs, and then working its way upward, robbing him of his appetite, and then the ability to swallow. Eventually it stopped his heart.  

    And even though I am certain that after the surgery he was completely unaware of anything going on around him, the thing that bothers me the most is that that for those last few moments of his life, he was in the nursing home, in his room, lying in his bed – completely alone. And it should not have been that way.

    Someone should have been with him when he passed away, whether he knew they were there or not.  

    I should have been with him.

July 2005