By Deer Roberts
The personal funds had run out. Everything depleted. After several nightmare months, that felt like years, of trying to work with Medicare for his mom’s care and finally getting head-way within the run-around paperwork, he got the dreaded call within two weeks of the “triumph,” which included watching that every penny and expense didn’t go over the political benchmarks. “Your mom is choking on everything, including her own spew . . . She’s taken a down-turn . . . We aren’t saying she is dying, but we’d like to call in hospice . . . Will you authorize a feeding tube?”
This photo taken of Phoenix artist, Jaque Keller and her parents at the moment of her father’s passing. This is the only photo, taken at the same time as two others, to have the glowing orb effect. (Photo by Dr. T Keller)
He felt like a proverbial cow-pie. Mom had left a medical directive before she got dementia; no extraordinary means of keeping her alive. He had to say no to the feeding tube. It leaves her, maybe, three weeks by my calculations. And mom is his last living family member. After she’s gone, he’s alone. He’s still grieving his dad and his brother, who came to him in a dream this week, spokesman for all the dead relatives and friends who accompanied him. They didn’t say a thing. Just looked at him. Life and death. Hard characters, to say the least, in this modern age.
On top of that, when he was a little kid, Mom made him promise to be there, holding her hand, when she passes on. He works 200 miles away from where she “lives.” Death comes like birth. You never know when it will happen. How can he guarantee the handholding? These days, some births get scheduled, but Cesarean deaths aren’t, at least not legally. So when does he start warming up the truck to keep promises for her final trek?
This confiding, on his part, made me think, again, of my own parents’ deaths. I was not present at either. Dad knew the last time he saw me would be the last time he saw me, even though a stroke had made it impossible to verbally communicate. We left it heartfelt. Mom, whose whole life was one of personal denial, didn’t acknowledge that when I left after a month of taking care of her at her deathbed in Michigan to return to the Southwest, it would be our last time together. The parting was void, like going over a bump in the road too fast or one never coming that was expected. I looked to her for acknowledgement. There was none. She acted as if I would be there the next week. Economically, if I was to make the funeral, there was no going back for the deathbed scene. Funerals are often staggered toward a week or more later. I got the call that mom was dying and wondering where her seven surviving kids were. Only two were with her. Grandkids, as in many dysfunctional families, didn’t count. Telling her how much I loved her and would miss her by phone left me with a feeling of having failed her. It stinks. I think I did my best by her. And it wasn’t enough. Presence is everything.
My friend’s mother will probably die alone with strangers. She is a remarkable woman, dying within a facility in Albuquerque she helped establish with strangers who help care for her. Past president of the local Audubon Society, a council member of the local Girl Scouts and a teacher to hundreds from a one-room schoolhouse, she helped shape the local lives and community into the best of what it is today. Her caretakers have no idea.
Families fragmented by dysfunction and job necessities all over the country are suffering from a fragmented and dysfunctional society. The most precious moments of our dying, after good lives, lost. Those who know us the best cannot be present when those from the other side await them out of the hearts of those still on this side. It is a sacrilege. The dead get past it all, I’m sure. But the living suffer.
Funerals become a shadow of what their substance is meant to be, though at my mom’s funeral, the Catholic bishop did come to sing Ave Maria, a capella, over her casket, for many good works she had done in the ’60s in the black southern community and Civil Rights Movement (we were living in North Carolina at the time and had threats from the KKK). At the time he was a nubile black Catholic pastor (in those days there was a black parish and a white parish in the same geographical locations). He was also remembering all she had done within her religious community since. (A lot of women in horrific marriages came forward to tell how she had helped them negotiate within the confines of the Catholic legalities of marriage. Mom had also stood up to a lot of anal-retentive pastors in her time.) His voice was so fine. It could have been Nat King Cole. But, it felt as though he had more to give her than I did, despite how grateful I felt toward him in the moment, and still do. I cried. A dozen Catholic deacons also showed up, despite that it was my dad who was a Catholic deacon. (They never acknowledged the folks from the prison and the AA community my dad saved, but those humble folks did. He also found clothes and mattresses for dozens of single moms and their children through St. Vincent de Paul Society. No deacons showed at his funeral.) Religious politics, it seems. But heaven knows, and so do I.
Something is terribly wrong. What has happened? Why are families sharded into crystallized fragments around death and dying? The best-laid hearts are so derailed by politics and political economics. This week the New York Times posted an article about the economic scramble to take care of our parents: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/16/opinion/sunday/how-medicare-fails-the-elderly.html. We’ve put our weight and trust in the wrong places along with the economics that send us chasing after jobs in order to pay the bills and feed our kids, too. More of us are taking on grandkids to boot. But this is really no new news to you. Somehow, we families all have gotten screwed. This is really basic humanitarian stuff. We need more. We need each other.
As baby boomers, we are next. Studies show our children are more inclined to feel familial toward their friends than to us. In order to keep abreast emotionally, academically and financially, most have retracted from traditional values trying to keep up. http://www.findingdulcinea.com/features/feature-articles/2008/august/Fewer-Wedding-Bells-Ring-for-Generation-Y.html. Job statistics infer they, too, may have chosen wrongly. http://www.mybudget360.com/does-a-college-degree-protect-your-career-unemployment-rate-for-college-graduates-highest-on-record/. A college degree, while it does raise the stakes, doesn’t guarantee anything except student debt.
The editors of this little publication tell me that we get a lot of good feedback from the articles presented. So what say you? Are there possible solutions out there? We need to survive, take care of our children, our bills and our parents and be nurtured when our time comes . . . not necessarily in that order. The constructs in place are failing these essentials. What new ones can we build?
