RIP Gene Hackman

Mr Janny

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Mar 27, 2006
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Still seems strange to me that if she started feeling bad and knowing he wasn't capable of helping her in his state that she would have a little time to call for help before she died.
Doesn't have to be so strange. I think we all know people who fight through their illnesses or resist going to the doctor until they are feeling really sick.
 

carvers4math

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Mar 15, 2012
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Doesn't have to be so strange. I think we all know people who fight through their illnesses or resist going to the doctor until they are feeling really sick.
Given that the symptoms would seem to resemble common respiratory or flu illnesses, she may not have wanted to leave him alone to go to the doctor. Hindsight would say she could have hired someone to come look after him, but I suspect they wanted to keep the severity of his Alzheimer’s private.
 

isucy86

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Apr 13, 2006
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Advanced Alzheimers I'm going with didn't notice, but I'm no expert.
He may have noticed, but the mind of an Alzheimer's/dementia victim can be like Swiss cheese. From a historical or short-term memory perspective and logical processing.

Just a quick example. My dad loved baseball. We would watch most Cubs games on TV. In his later stages of Alzheimers there were times he would just turn to me and say stuff like: "Is this a real game or practice" or "What are they trying to do?" or "What's the purpose of this?".
 

casey1973

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Apr 20, 2012
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Doesn't have to be so strange. I think we all know people who fight through their illnesses or resist going to the doctor until they are feeling really sick.
I guess. Obviously she didn't realize it was as bad as it was and must have hit her pretty quick at the end before she could muster a call. And Gene didn't even understand what was going on. A married couple dying a week apart with those circumstances. Horrible.
 

carvers4math

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Mar 15, 2012
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Our rat terriers loved shelling days. They were amazing dogs. The number of mice/rats they could take out in a minutes time was something to watch.
Which makes me wonder if they autopsied the dog although certainly that long without food or water is most likely cause of death. Could the dogs have been part of her exposure, either through walking them or petting them?
 

NorthCyd

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Doesn't have to be so strange. I think we all know people who fight through their illnesses or resist going to the doctor until they are feeling really sick.
My dad has damn near died twice because he was too stubborn to go to the doctor.
 

Pizzapitter

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Having experienced my Mother's dementia/Alzheimer's, up close n personal.... One moment, I was her son. The next moment, I was her taxi driver. The next moment, her dad. The next moment, her college student. The next moment, she wanted to visit her Aunt Virginia (deceased for a decade +). I could ramble on, in terms of who I "was," in my Mother's eyes. One more. She often assumed, that her husband of 63 year's, was a stranger in our home.
Nutshell, given Gene's Advanced Alzheimer state, NOTHING surprising here.
My Mother is in a much better, here off-earth-place. So is Gene and wife.
 

Rural

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Feb 3, 2010
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When I was a kid (mid 60s-early 70s) we had an ear corn crib. Basically thick fence wire walls with a concrete floor and a metal roof. We kept ear corn over the winter and would incrementally take pick-up truck loads to the local elevator the next summer. The further you got down in to the crib the more rat and mice nests you'd encounter. Full of urine and you'd put your pants legs inside your clodhoppers so the critters wouldn't run up your pant leg. I must have inhaled a ****-pot full of mice and rat feces dust every year for 10-12 years.

Not sure if the varieties we had back then were carriers, but nobody gave it a moment's thought at the time.
We’d finish shelling our two sided crib and there’d be a 100 dead rats in the lot that the dogs had killed.

Bizarre when thinking back on it decades later.

Obviously unclean and unhealthy but you weren’t in a closed environment with the droppings.
 

Die4Cy

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Jan 2, 2010
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I wouldn't necessarily assume Hackman had money for extravagant in-home care, either. It's been 20 years since he worked and most people in this world spend at the level of their income while they have it, without necessarily thinking about the future when they won't.
 

CyCoug

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I wouldn't necessarily assume Hackman had money for extravagant in-home care, either. It's been 20 years since he worked and most people in this world spend at the level of their income while they have it, without necessarily thinking about the future when they won't.
I read an article that his net worth was about $80 million. Probably more likely his wife wanted to do as much as she could herself for privacy or other reasons.
 

deadeyededric

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Dec 12, 2009
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I doubt anyone did that to the dog on purpose. My guess is that Hackman put the dog in the closet either thinking that was where he was supposed to be or that he was letting him outside.
I don't think they did but it's awful to think about how it ended for it.
 

jsb

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Mar 7, 2008
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I don't think they did but it's awful to think about how it ended for it.


You said "JFC don't let your animals suffer" which implies that you think they let their animals suffer.