naonowritmo 17 / Captain Fantastic

Captain Fantastic / Elton John










Being at University Hospital presented a different situation. It was not the local small town institution in which Mother had privileges in every sense of the word. At University, she was another patient. There were no private rooms, no allowances for her to seemingly run her office out of her hospital bed and no “rules bent.” Mother was not pleased with this.



Initially, I had become concerned at the news delivered to me by that young doctor. As a functional person, my mind immediately went to issues of practicality: who was paying the bills on Mother’s office and condo? What needed to be done to close her office, notify patients and shift records? What arrangements did she want made?


Ironically, it was only the last of those issues she was willing to discuss. Perhaps because for her, this was still an abstraction, and she held no acceptance of her impending death. She repeated information back to me, seeming to acknowledge the situation, and willing to talk about funeral plans. But everything else was off limits.


At first, when I tried to ask about the practical aspects of current life, she was evasive, side stepping questions. This had been a pattern through out my entire life, but now there was one element that was different: G.


G. called me every other day to either check on my communications with Mother or give me her report. As we got to know each other thought these conversations, a trust and familiarity developed as we both tentative started feeling the waters for just what and how much we could say. It was not long before we were both expressing our concerns.


“My mother says that “Jenny” is handling her check book and paying the bills. Do you know who Jenny is?”


“Well, the only Jenny I know is her nurse friend, the one who gives her medical advise? The one who’s that proxy person. Do you mean her?”


“Oh… I…don’t know.”


“Don’t you know her?”


“No. I’ve never laid eyes on her. … Do you know her last name?”


“You don’t?”


“No…”


“But she’s your mother’s health proxy.


“Yeah.”


“Haven’t you talked to her?”


“No. I don’t know her. I had never heard of her before last month.”


“Oh…”


With these conversations came tag team approaches, where each of us could get some information from Mother, piecing it together to form a coherent whole. When I learned that Jenny was a former patient and Mother had, in fact, entrusted her with the check book, I was a little concerned thinking of scam artists. But through G. I had a phone conversation with the woman, who was as confused as the rest of us and did not seem to have any criminal intent. All else was being handled by Mother’s lawyer. Mother claimed it was because I was busy and she didn’t want to burden me.


However, upon the moment of her death, all decisions would fall to me. Because of that she allowed numerous conversations about what she wanted for her funeral and the details, most of which she had already taken care of. Given all things, I decided that that it was more important to simply go with the flow.


I stopped worrying about her bills, her office, and associated arrangements. I had stopped hearing from JP. This concerned me a little, but I rationalized it was probably because she knew Mother and I talked at least every other day. Plus, G. hated JP, finding her unfriendly and uncommunicative. I suspected that my developing relationship with G. had also influenced JP’s silence.


So for several weeks we entered into a pattern. I’d speak to Mother and G., and G. and I would share notes. For several weeks G. was certain that each day was Mother’s last. She would describe how weak she sounded, how trembly, and these long silences or confused conversation. She would all the aliments that Mother had complained off and worry that the end was coming sooner than anticipated. I would talk to Mother and there would be no such list and she’d sound perfectly fine. Eventually, G. asked me point blank why I did not seem upset, about her clearly fragile state. What fragile state, I had asked. It opened a long conversation about my mother’s selective and creative sharing of information.


“You get that presentation from her because it gets the reaction she wants” I finally said one day in aggravation. I’d just gotten off the phone with Mother, who had interrupted our long distance call several times to yell at nurses for not getting her what she wanted. I was then thirty minutes into a conversation with G. who was almost in tears because the hour before, Mother had sounded so awful, she was thinking of getting in the car immediately to see her one last time. “In my experience, she is not the dying damsel for me because I can’t drop everything and cater to whatever she wants.”


“I know your mother. And I know she can be a bit of a pain in the ass, but she’s not like that.” G. defended.


“Maybe it’s just me, then. But she was just fine when I talked to her after you. I really think that when you can’t just drop everything and go ‘oh,oh.oh’ you’re going to see a different picture, I hope I’m wrong, but….”


G. had argued that I was wrong, until a few weeks later.