“Did you hear Joan Rivers has been moved to comfort care. You know what that means…”
Unfortunately for me (and for anyone else who knows where I’m going with this), I do know what this means. I hoped it wouldn’t turn out for Joan the same way it turned out for my grandmother, but on September 4th at 1:17 pm Joan Rivers was pronounced dead. 
She died surrounded by family and friends, as it usually happens when you’re in comfort care in a private room.
The first time I heard the term “comfort care” (also known as palliative care) was two days before my grandmother died.
She was in ICU for about 3 days before the harsh reality started to set in. She wasn’t responding to medicine, her body was rejecting food and no matter how much I willed it, her body was getting tired of trying.
At the beginning of March was when any variation of the word comfort gained the ability to make it hard for me to keep down food and triggered anxiety. It was on March 10th that I learned how not comforting comfort care made me.
For those lucky enough to have no clue what I’m talking about, comfort care, in my experience, is when doctors suggest putting a person’s quality of life first. (Instead of making the length of it a priority)
I’ll never be able to truly describe how gut wrenching it is to hear those words come out of a doctor’s mouth and to know that no matter what question you ask the answer will be the same. I also feel so much for Melissa Rivers because if the decision was left to her, I know how helpless of a decision it is to make.
There will never be a day when I don’t get tears in my eyes knowing that my grandmother’s life came to comfort care.
For us, the ultimate decision of taking her off life support and letting life/death happen as it may, came down to what we thought she would have wanted as a devote Catholic.
To me, now, comfort care is the scariest phrase in the world. It brings back memories of being forced to slowly let go – knowing her dying was a when and no longer an if.
My heart goes out to Melissa Rivers, her son and Joan’s family and friends who were around when she died. From someone who gets it, I know it’s the last place you wanted to be and yet you wouldn’t want to be anywhere else during her last minutes.
Photos: NBC News; Joan Rivers Twitter
