Greetings everyone!   I know this is late, but it's the best we could do.  I thought you'd enjoy seeing these last pictures of Adrian.

He and I lived here at James Street Home, an assisted living facility in Las Cruces, from late August 2000 until New Year's Eve when he had his colon attack.  He lived the rest of his days in Memorial Medical Center, Las Cruces' largest hospital, where he fought for his life and his freedom until May 7, 2001, when the Lord took him Home.  I continued on here at James Street after Adrian went into the hospital until they closed the home, then I moved into another facility on May 6, the day before Adrian died.   I still live there at Aspen House, and I'm glad for it, because it's so much closer to John and Sharon's house again.
 
 

Let me tell you about these pictures.  The Lord laid it on Jeremy's heart to borrow his company's digital camera a few days before Adrian had to go into the hospital that New Year's Eve of 2000, and he and John came over for a visit that evening to take some pics of us to show everyone back home.  I guess the disk got misplaced during all the excitement when Adrian had that first attack, and in the days that followed, no one had time to even think about the pictures.

Well, Jeremy stumbled over the disk the other day (almost two years later!), and John's been working on this page to show the pictures to all of you who have computers.  Maybe you can print some out for some of the rest--those near you who don't have one.

By way of review for those of you who don't remember, Adrian was getting weaker and weaker in the fall of 1999, and he sort of fell in the dining room at 7 Keiffer one day in September and couldn't get back up, so I called 911, and off to the hopital he went.  He had a large aneurism repaired, and he needed more oxygen than he was getting on his own.  Pat and John helped us a lot during that time, and they decided that we'd be better off for a while in New Mexico with John's family.

They found us an apartment right up the street from them, and we lived there from November 1999 to August 2000 when I had that other little stroke that took away my ability to get in and out of bed, in and out of the wheelchair, and so on.  So we moved here to James Street Home, about a fifteen-minute drive from John and Sharon's house.  (Isn't he a beautiful man?  I sure do miss him!)

We both loved it for many reasons.  We had company in the house (but not in our room!) all the time, and we had good people there all the time to fix our meals, clean our room, do our laundry, fix things that broke, help me in and out of the bathroom 24-hours a day--it was great!  Adrian and I played cards and Scrabble and watched TV, and he'd spend a lot of time writing letters and his columns.  The kids came over every day, and from time to time we'd go over to their house, out for a drive, or to church.  (How Jeremy got Adrian to use that DIGITAL camera, I'll never know--I guess he didn't tell him it's really a computer!)

Our room was really quite large, and not only was there a bathroom right next door to our room, I also had a potty chair right by the bed for nighttime use when necessary.  All I had to do was ring that bell!  We had four closets, three big windows to let in all the light we wanted, three dressers, and our card table where we played games or wrote letters.  All we needed and THEN some!

Our bed was the biggest one we've ever slept in!  It was actually two twin-size beds pushed together, with a king-size mattress pad and sheets on it.  (But we always used our little pillows!)  Adrian got to where he only really needed his oxygen part of each day, so whenever he was in bed for the night or lying down for a nap, he'd turn his machine on and use his nose tube.  And seeing the paper there reminds me that one of Adrian's favorite pastimes was reading the Daily Mail, which the kids brought over from their house every day.

Through our doorwary you can see the lights in the living room.  And there hanging on the wall is the firewood poem that George and Frankie gave us for Christmas one year.

Isn't that a nice window?  Facing east, it goes almost to the floor, and with the shades open in the morning, it was almost like being outside!

 Ah, yes, the "picture wall and dresser."  You may be able to recognize here a few things that we brought with us from 7 Keiffer.

John bought a 4-drawer locking file cabinet for us to use to keep our medicines and valuables in.  I still have it at Aspen House.  But Adrian always used his little plastic file box to keep his papers in for his "Looking Back" columns.

OK, let's get out of our room for a few minutes and show you around the rest of the house.

I don't remember that we ever had a fire in the fireplace, but, hey, after all, this is New Mexico!

I suppose one of the things Adrian liked best about this place was that they ALWAYS kept the coffee hot!  And even though he, like I, was confined to his chair most of the time, he could still get around the house, in and out of the bathroom on his own, and into the kitchen to get us a cup of coffee or a Coke whenever either of us wanted one.

You can see the dining room through that opening over the sink.  Let's go in there next.

The huge dining room had two big tables.  We ate up here at the table where we're sitting now.

The meals were always good--delicious, in fact, and we could have as much as we wanted.  Usually one of the grandkids would pick us up on Sunday mornings and take us to church in those days, and we'd always take everyone out to eat dinner afterwards--also good eating!

Look at those wistful eyes!  Somehow she seems to know she's in the dining room...

OK, girl, you may have one more, but then it's time for bed for you--for us, too!

Do you detect a far-off gleam in Adrian's eye?  None of us knew he was less than two days from leaving home and only twenty weeks from heaven at this point--or did he?  At any rate, these are the last pictures anyone ever took of him.  I'm certainly looking forward to seeing him again soon.  I love you all and thank you so much for stopping by!  G'night to all of you.

Love,
Dot
 

Click here to drop us a line:  jmcdgwin@zianet.com.

This is John.  I tried to write the above as Mom would've written it.  Her dementia--probably not Altzheimer's but close to it--is worsening a little every day, but she still has 3-5 "good days" a week in which she's pretty conversant.  (On her "off days", she'll just want to nap, but most always she'll take her medicines anyway before telling us to "go away and let me sleep.")

Her brain's memory connections are loose, and it seems to function sort of like a distributor on an older car's engine--the rotor spins around and makes the connection to make one spark plug fire, and for the next several minutes she'll be in 1932.  Then it will spin again and fire another spark plug, and she'll be in the fifties for awhile.  Sometimes several wires get crossed at once, and she'll be in several places--and times--simultaneously--including the present!  This always makes for interesting conversation, the trick being to probe her with questions to figure out where she is and what year it is so we can make the right comments for appropriate conversation.  She's still the same witty Dot she always was, though, and sometimes we'll just laugh and laugh together about something funny one or the other of us will have said!  She almost always knows us--she just isn't always sure how we're related to her!  She'll often call me her brother (Buster or George?) but she always calls me John--except one time recently when she introduced me to one of the caregivers as her "brother Bill"!

Here are three more pictures of Mom taken this past summer.   I'm tickled to be able to share all these with you finally!  I hope your Christmas 2002 was a wonderful celebration of our Savior's birth.

Love from all of us,

John, Sharon, Jeremy, Charity and Beau, Sarah and Jason, and Dot