Death Certificates… All this talk about death certificates in the news as of late is an unexpected source of pain for me – little pin pricks that bring me back to November of last year. Sara’s death certificate was the first one I saw outside of educational purposes (I’m sure I saw one in a history book or something as a kid). I had to wait longer than I expected to get it, and I needed it to take care of certain things.
I hate how casually some people make comments about them, as if each certificate doesn’t represent a real person who died and left behind loved ones who are grieving. Sara’s death certificate feels like a sacred item to me, an official record that shows a little of what we went through those last 2 weeks:
Cause of Death –
a) Hypercalcemia
b) Hyperparathyroidism
c) Abscess
d) Metastatic Endometrial Cancer
with Encephalopathy as an additional contributing factor.
Signed on November, 7, 2019.
It is so simple to say she died from cancer, which is true, but it also doesn’t tell the whole story. Cancer has this awful cascading effect that just takes over the body, and suddenly nothing works the way it is supposed to anymore. So much of the last two weeks was trying to solve the puzzle of these other side effects – primarily her electrolyte imbalance which was causing severe muscle weakness. Encephalopathy – such a mouthful – even though it’s not even listed as an actual cause of death, just a contributing factor, this was what scared me the most – this was when I knew things weren’t going to be okay. She started sleeping more, had trouble with tasks (like using her phone), started forgetting things, and in her last few days, couldn’t maintain a conversation.
I watched Sara die, and her death certificate leaves record of that. It doesn’t tell the whole story – it doesn’t tell how her room was filled with people who love us on her last full day here, how she was so worried about all the driving I was doing between the hospital and the house, or how I still think about that 911 call we had to make that resulted in her final hospitalization every time I go into our bathroom upstairs. But I’m glad that it captures some of the pain, some of the chain of events we were desperately trying to solve those last two weeks.