I was awake by 7, even though I didn't have plans to leave the house by 10. Why was I awake this early, you might ask? Well, I had to drive to Summit, NJ to see my cousin who will be going to hospice soon. He'll be the second of my cousins to die, and I wanted to make sure that I got the chance to see him while he's still above round.
It's a 90 minute drive from my place to Summit, mostly along highways. To avoid the tolls on the Garden State Parkway, I decided to take I-287 to SR-24 to reach Summit, and then side roads to the hospital. It wasn't a hard drive, but a boring one.
When I reached the hospital, I found something quite unusual: One enters the parking garage on the 4th level, and can go down or up to find empty parking spaces. Once one is at the main entrance to the hospital (floor 5), one can go down or up to reach patient levels. In short, the entry levels are not on the "Ground floor", something that can be confusing to a first time visitor.
To use an expression, my cousin looked like "death warmed over." He had almost no energy, and he was spending a lot of what he had left to talk with me. He was under heavy medication for pain, but not enough to have made this visit not worth it. We talked about our family, and people who died decades ago. We talked about our ethnic heritage (specifically about the Caribbean Island that our shared grandparents came from), and how our grandparents came to America. He mentioned that I should check into getting a third citizenship from this island, but I had to tell him that one can only get citizenship by descent if one's parents were citizens of this island country.
All too soon, it was time to leave. My cousin spent all of his energy speaking with me, and it was time for me to go. He'll be barraged by visitors tomorrow, and I expect that will take the last of his remaining energy away from him. I know that if he dies during the week, that I won't be able to attend the wake or the funeral. At least, I paid my respects to him while he was alive.
