When my paternal grandfather was dying, we literally sat in a waiting room for him to pass away. The scene was just too hard for us kids to watch.
And even through his coma, he managed to scream the lung cancer pain throughout the ward until more morphine was administered. The only sound we still heard was “ANNIEEEEEEEE,” cried by a woman who was tied to her bed 24/7 while shouting “ANNIEEEEEEEE” day and night, because that was the only thing she did. (Annie was the name of her only daughter, by the way, and it was the only surviving echo of her past.)
And to be honest: maybe an extra dose of morphine would have released her from the suffering that had constricted her every day for years on end. (But no.)
More than two decades later later, I received a Facebook message from a friend telling me that my ex-wife had been screaming for morphine while her best friends and family were on the way before she couldn’t take the metastasis anymore.
And I remembered the evening that my grandfather died.
Because that’s what morphine does in the very end —
It kills the pain, before the pain kills you.