When last we met...I'm being flip because this is hard to write about. Mom was sleeping on the spare room futon, which we had covered with a nice comforter we'd been given as a wedding gift; it was mostly pale yellow and pale blue. We even painted the room to match it a bit: the yellow (a bit stronger than we wanted), with blue and brown trim and yellow sunflower Wallies. There were bedclothes under the comforter, but Mom never quite realized it actually flattened out into a bed, and I wanted her to be able to lie down or sit up without a lot of fuss. So she was using a fleece and an afghan, with an extra blanket if she got cold (and as warm as it is upstairs in the summer, she was still cold a lot).

About the week before she passed away, I was thinking about getting the hospital bed, but by the time I would have gotten around to telling the nurse to order it, Mom was pretty much bed-bound and I couldn't even touch her, like shifting her legs or raising her head, without her being in terrible pain.

As I said the day it happened, I knew when someone died that they void themselves. I just didn't realize it would be so bad. The odor was the worst. James almost threw up when we had to go in there to clean. Even with a plastic mattress cover under the bedding, nothing was salvagable except the futon mattress itself and when we left here on the Saturday we were afraid that when we got home we would have to dispose of that as well. We left the room with an odor absorber in it, and what turned out to be a quarter of a vacuum cleaner bag worth of baking soda all over the floor and on the futon mattress. We also sprayed on some biological stuff you're supposed to use when the dog wets the carpet.

Well, the futon mattress did survive. Today I went out to find some new bedding. We had brought a pretty set of full-size pansy sheets and pillowcases home with us, as well as the flannel mattress cover. Linens'n'Things was having a tremendous clearance sale and I got a new egg-crate foam pad and two pillows for $20. I thought I had found a comforter in a "bed in a bag" set that was perfect, but it turned out it was the other pattern that was on sale. It was the right colors, but all neon shades and too loud! So I went to Bed, Bath and Beyond and there found a king-size quilt on sale: done as a patchwork, blue and an orangy-type yellow, with roses instead of sunflowers, but it pretty much matches. Only $40 and it came with pillow shams.

Now that it's all put back together it doesn't look bad.

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 2:46:00 PM

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