Death, public or private?

If this topic is covered elsewhere I apologize.

This question is on my mind these days. How do I envision my last weeks / days? No, I am not metastatic. But I don't like surprises and being prepared is my way of taking the surprise out of future events. Not the burn or the terror, but the surprise.

I come from a large family. I have very many first cousins and other relatives who might think that they need to traipse in and see me as I lay, withered and weak, in a bed. I find this thought abhorrent and upsetting. Here's why:

1) I am not a pilgrimage. Coming to see me affords you no absolution or blessing. If during the course of my illness you never bothered to call or write a note and check in just to say hey, how's it going, then do I really want to see you days before I die? If your concern over the years never manifest itself in a single action, what the hell are you doing standing by my bedside now? Hoping I will smile, pat your hand and lift your guilt at having been too busy to give a shit? Pffft. Don't waste the precious energy I do have left that is better spent grasping the hand of those who have walked with me all this way.

2) Dying, to me, is very vulnerable and private. I don't want to be seen with bad hair, no makeup, sloppy nightie, perhaps smelling of urine and waste, bad breath. Let's face it, dying is only pretty if you're Elizabeth Taylor. I feel exposed and vulnerable in situations like that. Even laying down while everyone else stands up makes one feel unsafe. So in that situation I only want to have around me those dearly loved. They are those who have cared no matter what. They are NOT the people from paragraph 1.

I feel bad that I might force my mild mannered HUub, who never likes to say no to anyone, to be the guardsman and gatekeeper, barring the way of those who might come to view me before I pop off. But I can't see any other way. It just feels to me that death is very intimate, it should happen with the attendance only of those most loved. Friends, family, but people who have demonstrated through their sustained actions that they love and value you. NOT that they've shown up for the obligational visit.

Several years ago a neighbour lady was in the hospital, terminal. Hub said we should probably go see her and I said no. Ours was not that kind of relationship. We were friendly, but not friends. Going to see her would be like stopping to view the horror of a car wreck without any intention of getting out to help. It is a form of voyeurism that disturbs me deeply, the hat-in-hand procession to the dying, even if you only knew them in a peripheral, arm's length, related but not relating sort of way. I do not want that. No.

I plan to put the brakes, very severely, on who I will see in my last weeks and days. As I leave this mortal coil there are those from whom parting is going to be, well, the death of me. And it is them I want with me. All my energy to go into looking at them, touching them, hearing them. I refuse to give my last energies over to people who gave little but come wanting something for their own needs now. At the end, I hate to say, I plan to make it all about me. And only the inner circle will be allowed in.