The voicemail popped up when we landed in Atlanta on Tuesday, May 30, of this year.
“Mr. Roberts,” the nurse said on the recording, “we wanted to update you that your mother is no longer eating and refuses to wear her BiPAP mask. Please call us when you can.”
My 71-year-old mother had been in Princeton Place for over a year at this point, switching between skilled therapy and long term residency. When she first went in after a hellacious infection, my younger brother and I assumed she would be right back at their home within a few weeks.
But weeks turned into months. And those months only saw a gradual decline; until that voicemail, when her health fell off a cliff.
She was gone five days later, and by God’s grace, I was able to give her as much of a coherent goodbye as possible the day after we returned home from Canada.
Familiarly, it was six months earlier, when I answered an understandably distressed phone call from my wife about her 73-year-old mother dying suddenly, just a one week after she returned home from various stays in hospitals and rehabilitation facilities.
In the span of six months, my two daughters lost both of their grandmothers.
And my wife and I, in the span of the same six months, held two services with no formal “end-of-life” plan for what the deceased had wanted.
Sure, we had ideas. My mother-in-law was very devout in her faith, so we had a very typical baptist funeral with hymns, a eulogy, and the pastor making the case for professions of faith. My mother? She was a believer, but over the past two decades her church attendance faded as she became more shut in. So we planned a celebration of life service, scattered with pictures taken prior to 1999 and complete with a playlist of Phil Collins, Richard Marx, and Chicago.
We did the best we could for them both. But is that truly what either of them wanted?
That, we have no idea.
End-of-life conversations with parents, guardians or caregivers are wildly uncomfortable. The subtext is basically “Hey, we recognize that you’re going to die while you’re still very much alive.” For some, the conversation is an invitation for death to come (see my wonderful mother-in-law) while for others it’s just easy to completely ignore (see my own mother).
When my mother was healthy, there were times she told us where to bury her. And other times, she said she wanted to be cremated (I hope you can understand my confusion). We found my mother-in-law’s end-of-life plans stuffed in the bottom of a vase – three months after her funeral.
We have cold-called banks, insurance companies, and the state just to ask if there were any policies or accounts in their names. We spent way too much energy (and endured some rudeness) when trying to prove that the deceased was actually, well, deceased. All because there was no clear plan of succession.
A 2017 study found that only one-third of Americans have advance directives for their end of life. That leaves the other two-thirds of us entirely in the dark, hoping beyond hope that we have honored our lost loved ones in a meaningful way. But sadly, we have no way to know for sure.
I implore you, reader, to consider from our experience what you can do for your loved ones while you are still very much here. Whether a living will, a word document, an itemized list on a yellow notepad – anything is better than asking your family to guess.
Many of our mothers, parents, family members and friends have passed and now are in better places. The things of this world have faded for them, and they are in their full glory.
It’s those of us left behind that mourn and grieve, and sometimes have to endure the stress of guessing, wishing for more direction.
Talk to your loved ones today. Find a loving way to broach this difficult subject.
Because we all know the day will inevitably come when it will no longer be possible to have this talk.
