Mom called to say she was dying.
I have pancreatic cancer. I’ve known for two years. There’s nothing to be done, and I’m going to be gone within days or weeks.
I was not completely shocked because Mom had behaved differently over the previous year. I also didn’t really believe her.
She had never met a story that couldn’t use extra drama.
Mom’s 80th birthday party in July
It was like other family moments.
Mom had guilted us into traveling to her home in Asheville. She imagined herself the family matriarch like her mother before. This would be the moment to order our marches and to show off her mountain.
A week before the event, Mom’s sister called to say that her crew was not coming. My Aunt had been diagnosed with Covid a month earlier. Sure, she felt fine now, but Mom was having none of it.
My medical sense could accept a 79-year-old’s desire to maintain a distance from a bad virus. If the American Indians had avoided smallpox, measles, and the flu, their descendants would not be stuck on such tiny, parched lands today.
Talking to Mom I guessed that canceling her sister’s travel visa was not really about disease. Mom respected Covid slightly because a “healthy, handsome man” in her neighborhood had suffered lasting pulmonary harm. Otherwise, she had little concern for any infection.
No, Mom was angry at her sister.
Over the decades Mom had become expert at finding mole hills on any mountain. A missed holiday card or a birthday message framed not quite right could earn a fourteen-month silent treatment.
I know an insult when I see one.
As the day of the trip approached, my nuclear family of four was not universally happy to be going. We had previously avoided Asheville out of our own petty resentments and our too-busy lives.
The resentment had begun two decades before. My brother left a message on my phone: “Guess who’s moving to Boston? Mom is! Tag, you’re it!”
Mom, the Southern grandam, did move to Sherborn, a rustic town west of Boston. It was a good thing. I enjoyed it. She lived far enough away that the unannounced drop-in was unlikely. And unlike how she saw my brother, Mom didn’t imagine me handy enough to supply free home maintenance services.
When our first child came, visiting Gran on the weekend became central to our Norman Rockwell moments. Mom helped celebrate her first grandchild’s birthday party at our condo. Hers was one of the first pools he ever swam in. I loved the grandmother-son-grandson connection, and I thought she did, too.
Life appeared to be going swimmingly until Mom, with no preamble, announced she was moving away. Away from her two grandchildren. Away from her new husband’s grandchildren. Away to a place that was hard to get to from here. Away to Asheville, North Carolina.
Her explanation was simple:
I’ve always wanted to live in Asheville…and it’s not like you visited me every weekend, anyway.
By 2021, my family had yet to visit Asheville despite Mom’s many years there, and my kids were not excited to be going last July.
She had never deeply connected with either grandchild despite sincerely wanting the bond to magically happen.
Years earlier on Christmas Eve, Mom had eagerly told me that her precocious five-year-old granddaughter had started calling her “Gran.”
I’m so excited that she chose the name, Gran. Gran is wonderful!
We had never heard the term, Gran, used in our family before. After a brief interrogation, I had no heart to explain that what Mom was hearing from her headstrong grandchild was not Gran.
Her granddaughter was calling Mom “Grim.”
As in The Grim Reaper.
Feeling a little guilty, I was happy to be able to force a visit to Mom’s home around her 80th Birthday.
Lesson 1: Listen to those we care about
We arrived in Asheville on a Friday afternoon, slid down a mountain stream on Saturday, celebrated Mom’s 80th birthday with friends on Sunday, toured the Biltmore on Monday, and said goodbye on a Tuesday afternoon.
It was perfect.
And odd.
Rather than ordering us around, Mom sat with her grandchildren. She asked questions. She listened.
Rather than complaining on Friday that we were leaving too soon on Tuesday, she talked about how it was a perfect visit. So much fun. She was thankful we had come.
On the drive away, my newly-minted teenage daughter said, “That was nice. We should come back to visit again.”
Christmas in December
Christmas at our home has become quite the tradition.
Before grandchildren, Christmas was Mom’s thing. My brother, sister, and I traveled home to Memphis from across the country. We celebrated around a perfectly prepared Victorian Christmas village dusted with flakes of canned snow.
Once we had children, the gravity shifted. By the time our eldest turned two, family would join together at my place or my brother’s to share in the wonder of young children.
After my brother was killed, my place became home base.
The icy stares shared between my Mom and sister made the living room feel like Medusa’s garden. Over time we learned to arrange as little overlap as possible. One visited before Christmas, one after. Christmas Day itself was celebrated like the WWI Christmas Truce on the Western Front.
Lesson 2: Make life more about others than ourself
This past Christmas, though, was distinctly different.
Mom showed up a few days before Christmas. Having driven almost one-thousand miles, she seized the front hallway like a soldier going over the top. After she established the beachhead, she was more gentle.
We watched A Year Without A Santa Claus without her insistence that we see her favorite: Miracle on 34th Street. She happily volunteered to make dinners on a couple of late nights. She joyfully passed out gifts without that awkward look.
Why am I not getting more presents?
She listened to the kids telling their stories, rather than re-telling hers from fifty years ago. She drove the kids to their events. She took the kids out shopping for their last-minute gifts.
When we ran out of time to make gingerbread houses, she was sanguine. I was the one a little perturbed.
Everyone got along like a big, happy family. In the days after she left, both grandchildren said, “That was fun. We got to know her better than ever.”
Mom’s call in January
As I said, I wasn’t completely surprised when Mom called at the end of January to tell me she was dying.
I had noticed extra pain in her walk. Much more telling, though, was the big change in the way she engaged with us.
Despite those changes, I still couldn’t believe Mom was dying of pancreatic cancer.
Her family was never very good at medicine. They hoarded old bottles of paregoric to use for tooth pain, to calm a baby’s cries, and for whatever other pain came along. Paregoric, by the way, is camphorated tincture of opium, and it became a controlled substance in 1970.
Mom’s family smeared salt on wounds and didn’t visit doctors or dentists for much beyond broken bones. Medicine was not our thing.
When I asked Mom what the doctors had said about her disease, she explained that her general practitioner had diagnosed it. Because she didn’t want any extravagant treatment, she had never gone back. Her bi-annual checkup was in a few days, though, and she agreed to go.
In today’s world of hyper-specialized medicine, I didn’t have to ask my wife, the pediatric oncologist, whether family doctors diagnose cancer.
Thinking back to a poor guy I knew who lasted only a few months after his Whipple surgery, Mom’s symptoms didn’t match his. A Google search on pancreatic cancer — not the paragon of medical diagnosis, of course — didn’t match either.
What I did know was that Mom asked for my sister’s phone number and her new address. She was stepping into that no man’s land and daring to bridge the gap.
Over the next three weeks, I spoke to Mom a lot. Fortunately, we had built a good relationship over the years — one without significant regrets.
After a second doctor’s appointment, Mom phoned during my daughter’s basketball game. She was wildly happy.
I’m feeling much better. The doctor doesn’t think I’m so sick!
It was wonderful news. I had just witnessed her granddaughter’s second basket of the season so I could share some good news, too.
I began planning a quick Asheville trip for this summer.
A week later I was caught napping.
The number was unknown to me. I answered because it was coming from North Carolina. An emergency room doctor introduced herself and said, “Your mom may have had a fall or simply passed out. She is unconscious now. Considering her condition, I don’t know if she is going to wake up.”
Mom never did.
The practical side of death
Once we get past the pain and the process of dying, the practical side of death falls upon those left behind.
No matter where Mom is now, with her mother in Heaven or at peace in an eternal beyond, she doesn’t have to deal with our world anymore.
I’m glad that Mom was able to break through at the end. In her last moments she listened to people better. She made those moments more about others than herself.
The memorial service went well. We celebrated the best of Mom. We laughed and cried about the rest.
It was great seeing my aunt and the family that hadn’t been able to join us for Mom’s 80th Birthday weekend.
Like an ungrateful child left behind, it is time now for me to complain. To highlight some other things we can do to make death easier.
Mom did author a Will and Last Testament, but she also left a big mess in a house stuffed with generations of lives gone by.
She had replaced an earlier Will that described a most unusual sorting method for all that stuff. Her three children were instructed to spend their monopoly money while an auctioneer encouraged us to bid for items among Mom’s china, silver, furniture, collectibles, jewelry, dolls, and family memorabilia.
Do I hear fifty dollars, fifty dollars for the 1960 Russian Madame Alexander doll?!? Going once, going twice,…
Fortunately, the auction approach had lost its lustre once my brother was killed, my sister estranged, and the world no longer interested in the trappings of the twentieth century.
An estate in 2023 is more about bank accounts, life insurance, retirement accounts, financial accounts, and accounts managed online. People don’t much value the physical stuff that defined a proud family two generations ago.
Lesson 3: Make our deaths easier for those left behind
Having spent the last seven weeks working through Mom’s estate, knowing that I have many more weeks of work and at least twelve more months before it can possibly “close,” I begin to understand the physical challenges we leave for those left behind.
Estate planning is a multi-billion dollar industry populated by highly-paid professionals expert in old laws and awkward processes that are understood differently in every state, in every company, and by every employee in each of those companies.
Here are a few things I’ve started doing in case death sneaks up on me.
Create a Death Book that details many things:
- What I want done with my body. (Mom didn’t say.)
- The location of wills, codicils, living will, power of attorney, and contact information for any attorneys or accountants to help with the journey. (Mom was good about this and got it mostly right.)
- Documentation of all assets, accounts, and meaningful property. (Mom left partial details, scattered everywhere, like an easter egg hunt.)
- Documentation of any bills, including mortgage, insurance, electricity, power, internet, and so on. (These are becoming clear as the past-due notices arrive and the services are shut off.)
I will also work to avoid the nine to eighteen months or more of probate and legal fees required to prove ownership of estate property.
Mom did some of this, but I realize now that it’s all or nothing. “Almost” means you’re going to probate court. I wasn’t surprised to learn that her second husband, a very good guy, a professor of accounting, even, had created trusts but then NOT funded them. This is hard for all of us:
- Declare bank accounts Paid-on-death (POD) to successor(s)
- Declare financial accounts Transfer-on-death (TOD) to successor(s)
- Name beneficiaries on all investment and bank accounts
- Consider creating (and funding) Trusts and Living Trusts
In my Death Book, I will urge my executor to
- Establish an estate checking account immediately after the probate court recognizes the estate
- Order estate checks the same day the account is created
- Locate funds ASAP to place in the estate checking account…because I needed them the day after Mom died
I’m not two months past Mom’s death and already wish I could offer guidance to myself just seven weeks ago.
No matter whether the process of closing Mom’s estate takes thirteen or twenty-three months, whether I have to witness three or twenty-three more bank employees disagree with one another about how things really work, I wish for one thing:
I wish I could speak with you again, Mom. Even just one more time.
You should know that your son and daughter were by your side for five days before you left. We appreciate the many times that you stood by us.
Know, too, that your granddaughter cried when she heard that her Gran had died.
Gran, we will miss you.
© J. Andrew Shelley, originally published in The Memoirist on Medium
