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Is your dad at home, or at a hospice care center? I've known people who did it both ways, and the policy seems to basically to allow family members to come and go at will. My aunt and her colleagues focus on keeping the patient as comfortable as possible, so your dad won't be in any pain.
A friend of my husband's recently died in hospice, so I'll relate that experience: she was 76 years old, had been widowed young, led a full life raising children, pursuing her hobbies, seeing friends. But her kidneys failed, the dialysis treatment basically allowed her no life, she felt terrible all the time, and even though there was a chance that a donated kidney might become available she decided to let nature take its course. Her children were VERY upset. But she explained that it was her decision, and hospice was set up for her in the home she loved so well.
Dying was a three-week process (remember, everyone is different. I can't give you a timeline for your dad.) Since she was no longer on dialysis her body behaved as a body naturally does after its kidneys shut down. It comes to the point where life can no longer continue, and the rest of the body's systems shut down. She was quite lucid for a long time, though, and hospice ensured she didn't suffer. Different people stayed with her, but an unmarried niece took time off from work to move in there and be with her at the end. She was able to see "the people she loved," as she put it, one last time, and one of them was my husband. She called and asked him to come. She was much older than he, but they were very good friends. Because of hospice care, her dying became a long process of going to sleep, and finally not waking up.
My sister was a critical care nurse for years, and she says that the dying are very aware of what's going on. She says people shouldn't start rattling on about things while they're in a dying patient's room; the person can hear them, and it'll kill them to think that the last time the loved one heard their voice they were bitching about something.
A final thought: people who've been in your shoes have told me that their loved one sort of had a resurgence, a day or two before their death. They became stronger, more animated, lucid; think of the sun as it sets, the moment just before it dips below the horizon. My stepson recently lost his wife, and the day before she died she was practically her old self again. It's like the body gathers itself up, one last time.
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