The Hardest Day of My Life: Removing You Off Life Support

The hardest thing to do for anyone that you love is to have to make the life and death decision to take them off the life-support machine and watch them slowly die and then pass away from this life to the next- which I know is better, but I am very selfish. I had to do this for four of the dearest people in my life and three of them were the men in my life starting in 1995 for my beloved Rocky and ending with my dearest Frank, on January 28, 2008.

January 24, 2008 started out like any other day for my late beloved Frank, he had gotten off of work where he works for the Chicago Transit Company as a Security Officer, he went to his mother's house, and told her he was going to rest for a couple of hours, and then he would take her shopping. This was his normal routine.

Well, according to his mother, she had a hard time waking him from his nap, and placed a cold wet cloth over his forehead, and he woke up, and they went shopping, after they went shopping his mother always took him out and brought us our lunch, and he got home around 12 PM and gave me my double cheeseburger, french fries, and coke, and we had lunch together.

I don't know when the headaches began, but he started to have headaches, and he would ask me when was the last time he had taken his advil and could he take some more. I never put one and one together that it could be something more than just a headache, in which case it was.

Frank went to the bedroom, and laid down and told me to get him up around 9 PM, so he could get ready to go back to work at 10:30 PM on January 24, 2008 as he had to be at work at 12 AM. Well, I went back to our bedroom at 7:30 PM, and I shook him, but I could not get a response, and I started to panic, and I called his mother Marie, and she told me she had a hard time waking up in the morning and to place a cold wet cloth over his forehead. I did that and no response.

I then called Frank 's supervisor, and he told me to shake him and place my fist in his side, and still I got no response and his supervisor finally told me to call the Paramedics, and I called them and they came and they tried to wake him up, but got no verbal response but they did get some physical response as he was using his fists thrashing them around.

The paramedics got a high reading from his blood pressure- Frank had never had high blood pressure it had always been 120/80, which is perfect, and they say he had extremely high blood sugar, but he had never had high blood sugar, and they said it was in the 250 range, and his blood sugar was usually 100, which is normal.

The paramedics transported Frank to St. Francis Hospital in Evanston, IL, where the emergency doctors started their tests to try to find out what was wrong with Frank, and it wasn't until Friday morning that Frank's mother, a friend of Frank's name Nancy, Robert and I f found out that he had suffered a brain stem hemorrhage brought on by high blood pressure.

The doctor's had asked me to sign a form allowing them to place Frank on Life Support, so I did, we had talked about it, and Frank had told me so many times that if he became so incapacitated that he did not want to be kept of life support so remove him for it and let him go in peace.

Frank's mother, who was his next of kin, left it up to me to remove Frank from the life support as we had been together for 12 happy years. I looked at Robert and Nancy, and I told the doctor that specializes in these cases to remove Frank from the life support on January 28, 2008 as he was not going to come home to me, he would was going to be the same, and if he did survive, he would not be able to take care of himself. Marie signed the papers and the nurses and doctor removed the life support from Frank.

One by one his organs started to shut down, his blood pressure went up sky high, and the last thing to stop being his kind loving heart. I stood there holding his hand from January 23 until January 28, 2008 all the way up until he died. I told him I would never leave him, and I did not.

I lost a part of my side when he died, and I lost a part of my heart when he died. I haven't been able to move on, and I have tried very hard.

I had him cremated because John, Frank, and I will all be laid to rest when my time comes at Popular Springs Baptist Church in Uriah, Alabama in my brother's grave. This is how Frank and John wanted it. We were together in life, and we will be together in the hereafter.

It has been nearly two years since Frank passed away, and there isn't a day that doesn't go by that I don;'t think of him and how much I loved him, and he loved me. I was truly blessed to have had him in my life.

The only trouble we had encountered after his death was with his mother refusing to paying for the cremation but with the help of State Representative and the Church - Marie paid for her son's cremation and the church gave him the rites of Christian burial on February 3, 2008.

I have left my Living Will and Durable Power of Attorney for Health Care in the hands of my boyfriend, Robert now, and I have asked him to see if anything happens to me that I am not kept on life support but to keep me comfort and let me go. This is my final wish because if I can't sustain life on my own I don't want to be kept here artificially.

Losing a love one is hard enough, but taking them off life support is even harder and watching them die is even harder than the other two. Your heart breaks, and a part of you can never be replaced.

It is like that song that Lily sang in The Secret Garden " How Could I Ever Know."