Saturday/Sunday

Saturday morning was the monthly AARP meeting.  Phyllis, who is President, is back from Tennessee, and bless her heart brought me some Oxo.  I hadn't said I missed it, or wanted any, but it is not available in Oklahoma so she thought I might like some.   She had been holidaying on the Tennessee/Georgia border, and was telling us she couldn't understand a word they were saying.  I was pulling her leg over the fact that she's not one to talk about accents,  her Cockney accent is so strong she sounds as if she just left the East End that morning.   I don't know how she has kept it for 50 years.

I wasn't wildly excited about the speaker, I prefer it when they have some live music, but actually it was quite useful.  The manager of the hospice where Phyllis volunteers talked about end-of-life decisions, and she brought us all the appropriate forms.   I am not good at forms.  I can't even complete a tax return, and much as I wish I could just put this lot in the post to Jeremy I think I've got to fill them up here.

They included a 'Do Not Resuscitate Me' Consent form.   A Durable Power of Attorney (With Health Care Powers Only) and an Oklahoma Advance Directive for Health Care, also known as a Living Will.

Their provisions are (and I'm paraphrasing)

1.Do everything you can to keep me alive.   A ventilator, and artificially administered nutrition and hydration (tubes down me) - the whole nine yards, just don't let me die.

2. Don't bother with the ventilator, but give me nutrition and hydration.

3. No ventilator, no nutrition, no hydration, just let me die, I've had my four score years and ten, and the rest.    This is what I'm opting for.

The speaker said that at the end of life we don't want to be worrying about bits of paper, there are only four things to say that are important.
1. I love you
2. I forgive you.
3. Please forgive me.
4.Thank you.

I think I will ask Mark and Mary to help me fill the forms out.  

I felt after a morning of all this heavy stuff I needed a reward.  I went to IHOP and ordered a stack of blueberry pancakes.  Obviously I couldn't eat them all, I brought half home in a to-go box.

Sunday I was at Emmanuel.   I couldn't see the donuts anywhere - shock, horror, panic, was I supposed to get them, is this the 2nd Sunday.   No it isn't, relief.   

I was reading the lesson from the prophet Amos.   I remembered that the very first assignment I ever did at Chichester was a thousand words on the 'political background of Amos' prophecy'.   I don't know how I did it, I couldn't do it today.

After the 10.30 Service there was lunch, and compulsory attendance - because I am a lay minister - at a seminar on 'Safeguarding God's People'.    I am not going to bore you with its content, it was more fun stacking the dishwasher.