San Diegans at Heaven's door

Disabled and aging talk about pain and dying

Author

By Various Authors

Publish Date

April 1, 2018

Frank in Coronado apartment. "Arrested in a big sweep. Drugs. He’s been in jail two weeks. He’s filthy. They’ve shaved his head because his hair is so matted. Not speaking." (Sandy Huffaker, Jr.)

Frank with his mother, 1972. In Bangkok, he was a plump little kid with an acoustic guitar.

What's wrong with Frank?

Lita bursts into tears. Frankie’s her beloved eldest son by her first marriage. The one she dedicated to God the day he was bom, throwing all her marbles into her Roman Catholic faith. The one most hurt by her breakup with his dad, the USAID worker. The one who somehow took the heat for the breakup. He was his mother’s son.

By Bill Manson, May 30, 1996 Read full article

Ron (Robert Burroughs)

Final hotel

“She was a strong swimmer,” says Bill. “Twenty years ago she was swimming out to the buoy at Santa Monica. Eighty years ago she and Rose Kennedy used to swim out to the boats in the bay at Martha’s Vineyard. They’d give them a drink and send them back. Yeah, the Rose Kennedy. They were friends. She’s quite a lady.”

We don't like to talk about that subject around here

Lucile is relaxed and efficient, casually dressed in slacks, a blue turtleneck, and a cardigan. She speaks in a direct colloquial manner, reminiscent of her service in the Navy Hospital Corps. Asked whether she has ever witnessed a death, she says, “Oh yes! I had a lot of that during the war. We did our special watches, and many times, they would die on our watch. And I saw my mother, saw my father die."

By Madeline DeFrees, April 10, 1997 Read full article

Evelyn Harris, hospice patient. It’s often said that death is a mirror that makes us reflect on life. (Sandy Huffaker, Jr.)

Grief is like carbon monoxide

At this point, this article is going to seem to go seriously astray, so I might as well come clean. My aim is not simply to write about hospice, though that in itself is a worthwhile aim, as hospice is poorly understood even by the mainstream medical community. My aim is to make you less afraid of death, and examining hospice is one way to do this.

By Tim Brookes, May 25, 1995 Read full article

Milam learned to walk so well that TABs sometimes didn’t notice he was a cripple.

Lorenzo Milam and the cripple's secret history

For years Milam didn’t think of himself as crippled. For someone of his generation, disability was not to be acknowledged. The risks were too great. (Limbs paralyzed by polio were sometimes amputated because some doctors felt the patients were better off without them.) Forty years ago, choices for cripples were few. If a cripple could not assimilate into the mainstream, he was locked into a life of dependence.

By Abe Opincar, July 15, 1993 Read full article

Michael. The SRO, single room occupancy hotel, came to the rescue of those determined not to go to a nursing home.

Room at the inn

Limited paranoia might save the sufferer from the fate of William Henry Hart, the 77-year-old Maryland Hotel resident who landed in prison hospital after his second brush with the law. Hart set fire to his room because someone reportedly threw away his dentures. Federal prosecutors had agreed earlier to drop charges for Hart’s wheelchair bank robbery of $70 to buy heart medicine, provided that he stayed out of trouble for a year.

By Madeline DeFrees, Dec. 22, 1994 Read full article