Esther Mae Miller’s
Last Days
Esther Mae’s nickname
was Sita, which came into existence when as a child she
was unable to pronounce “sister” correctly when
speaking to her sister Delrose. She was immediately
liked by everyone who met her and loved by everyone who
knew her. There were more than a dozen people in
and around her hospital room when she died.
Sita was diagnosed with stomach
cancer on Sept. 19, 2005. We had read and were told
by doctors then that cancer of the stomach is the meanest
kind. This we found to be understatement. Sita began
chemotherapy treatments in October. At first there seemed
to be some progress but in the ensuing months and weeks,
she began suffering more and more with extreme nausea and
the recurring and damnable vomiting spells which never
turned up more than a minute bit of spittle but which
added increasing pain and misery to an already-hurting
stomach each time. There was pain in her legs and
lower back that progressively got worse.
Early Thursday morning on Feb.
23, 2006, she started trying to get up from her hospital
bed in our living room (where I also slept, on the couch)
and I went to her to help. She looked dizzy and was
unable to get herself sitting upright in the bed. She
seemed to want to get to the portable toilet next to the
bed. With me trying to help, her legs gave way and
she sank to the floor between the bed and the toilet.
Try as I might I could not lift
her back into the bed. She was dead weight and apparently
had no strength in either her arms or legs to help me get
her up and into bed. I then called 911 for an ambulance.
The ambulance took her to the
emergency room of the Seguin hospital for treatment. At
the hospital she seemed to be recuperating although she
remained weak. She was able to talk to me and to the
medical staff despite sedation.
The hospital staff advised they
would be moving her to a room in Intensive Care. I told
them I needed to go to the office to try to do something
with the mountain of work that had been accumulating in
the weeks past and that they should call me when she was
assigned a room and I would come in. Not too long after
that I got a call from the pastor in her room, who
advised she had taken a turn for the worse and I should
come. I did and when I got there she seemed to be
sleeping rather comfortably, but she was apparently in a
comatose state because neither I nor the six or seven
friends and relatives in the room at the time could get
her to respond to questions. Her aunt and very good
friend, Clara Jubela, asked Sita repeatedly to squeeze
her hand if she could hear her questions. She never got a
hand squeeze.
Sita’s vital signs on the
monitors in the room were a bit weak but fluctuated for
several hours: for a time it seemed she was holding her
own. Then the monitor signs started going down very
gradually and after a few more hours her heart simply
stopped beating. It truly was an easy death: she was
breathing a bit heavily but seemed to be painlessly
sleeping while progressively getting weaker, until her
life ended.
Her death really got to me and
others in the room, but for me there was some consolation
in knowing that finally she would be
free of the pronounced pain and misery she had been going
through for so many weeks. We all knew – I in
particular, having been with her in her illness –
that even if she recuperated enough to return home the
pain and misery would never be escaped. Two
plaintive statements I’ll never get out of my mind
are: “Bus, I feel so bad” and
“It’s just not worth it.” Over
recent weeks she uttered them many times. The first
one in particular cut deep. In our 54 years
of marriage I was able to fix many things, but this time
there was no fix.
Whenever I left our home for a
few hours to address the monstrous workload piled up and
always waiting at our business, there would be her
anxious words: “I’m so glad you’re home,
Bus” when I returned. For me these words
always overwhelmed. They brought forth my great remorse
for having to be away from her. Even when
explaining work had to be done if our business was to
continue, inside I wanted to cry and cry.
Had we known she would die so
quickly she would have been saved much of her pain and
misery: We could have decided against chemotherapy
and just let her live what months and weeks she had left
with no treatment at all except for pain medication.
One particular early procedure to install a tube up her
arm to enable chemotherapy caused unbearable pain and
misery for her (she told me afterwards she hoped she
would never have to go through something like that
again); in practice it failed, achieving nothing. Up
to a dozen MRIs were prescribed; all proved to be
miserable experiences for her and all came back negative,
achieving nothing.
The saddest thing I’ve
ever seen is her getting up over and over and sitting
forlornly on the side of the bed to alleviate her pain
and nausea. There was nothing you could do and it
just broke your heart.
Sita was the most beautiful
woman the state of Texas ever produced. Why she
settled for me for a husband I wonder still, as surely
did the many people we met on our frequent travels. I was
blessed as few men can be. I remained conscious of this
always and did my very best to see that she had a good
life.
George “Buster”
Miller
(husband)
