terminal restlessness

My father has always been a trooper of sorts. Life has never been good to him. He would always just take it. He would always keep going. He was never able to relax. With his rational mind already gone, he's all impulse now. He keeps trying so hard not to let the cancer keep him down. He doesn't relax, he barely sleeps. As his body fails him, dragging him down, he fights so hard to keep sitting back up, standing back up, finding some excuse to keep walking around. Even as the world grows dark and muted, as he's getting weaker, his muscles atrophied, his organs failing, he keeps trying.

In a fleeting moment of relative lucidity, he told me that he feels like he keeps waking from dreams, only to find himself in other dreams. Now, he's finally settled down. He's sleeping, but far from peacefully. He's dying and all I can do is sit here with him.

It's surreal. My sister and I have been discussing whether this is something other people have any knowledge of or experience with. I had no idea death was often like this. Neither did she. There are a few differences in our approach. We've been sedating him minimally. We're able to do this, only because we watch him 24/7. It would be impossible otherwise, so what most people see is probably different. If they're even around in the the very last days to see it.

Other people are more familiar with someone in this sort of situation, sleeping until they die, from what I can tell, and that's only if they're dying of a condition that results in this shutdown state it goes into. It occurs particularly frequently in cancer patients, I've read.

It's brutal and horrifying. Watching someone die, day after day, stress filled night after night, while they're tumbling through the worst trip of their lives. It occurred to me that it does seem to resemble tripping on hallucinogens in some ways, and I wondered if it could be similarly guided into being more pleasant. He's calmer in the fresh air outside. I play his favorite music for him. It seems to help.