Three days short of her 94th birthday my mother quietly and mercifully died in her sleep last week.  I had discussed this eventuality at length with her in better days. She had agreed to make me full Power of Attorney with lawyers filling out the paperwork. Iron clad. She had asked if any small amount of money that may be left over after her death be given to my children. My children are well cared for so I elected to give anything left over to my daughter Andrea’s son who is starting college this Fall.

My mother  was exceptionally well cared for at the facility she resided in. She had a semi-private room and she was quite comfortable, pictures of glory days on the wall. I blew in now and then always unannounced and spoke with care givers, and I was always pleased.   She eventually progressed to deafness and musculoskeletal difficulties due to arthritis but was clear of mind. She read big print books and did lots of crossword puzzles right up to the end. I’ll probably rot in purgatory for giving her a big print copy of Sarah Palin’s book (hard to find big print). Her response to that was “that woman’s an idiot”, so her mind was definitely clear.

She went to sleep one night last week and was found with “Altered Mental Status” (unresponsive) in the morning. Probably a stroke as she was hypertensive her whole life. On hearing that by phone, I had previously arranged to make her hospice status and she died quietly a day later without ever coming around.  It was a good death, as they go 😉

I think the story of her and my father is interesting. I will relate it for anyone with an interest in such things. Delete if no interest. It is, after all, Sunday and I can write anything I want 😉

My father was born into extreme poverty in 1918 on a dirt farm in Spooner, Wisconsin, a brutally barren place with no hope for anyone unfortunate enough to live there. No running water and outside bathroom. Like the cliché, he really did walk miles to school (and the outhouse) in waist deep snow and no one cared whether he went or not. It would have been easy to drop out and go to work at whatever brought body and soul together. He didn’t have two nickels to rub together.  His father was a neer-do-well itinerant jack-of-all-trades and master of none who traveled around the country hopping on freight trains, scratched out a living doing what he could. Performed magic tricks for a few pennies, drew pictures (I have some), did odd-jobs and so on. He hung around just long enough to impregnate my grandmother, who eventually threw him out. He died of a ruptured appendix at Cook County Hospital in 1944.

To make a VERY long story short, my father ended up in veterinary school at Texas A & M, did pretty well.  He worked hard and managed to dumb luck into some good things for him in veterinary medicine.  He liked anatomy and he was offered an assistant professorship at Texas A & M in the Veterinary School with the promise of a career and tenure. My mother had attended Texas Christian College in Austin and ran out of money and so was working as a secretary in the Department of Anatomy at Texas A & M where my dad was teaching.  They had proximity and started dating around 1941, married in 1942. This is apparently the life my mother had anticipated and one of the premises she married him for. She wanted to be a nice stable professor’s wife in the milieu she knew and understood. She perceived their future as it appeared to be at the time.

Dad didn’t say why he decided to marry my mother but I suspect it was because she exuded some element of class he thought would be good for him. Nailing down a beautiful woman is a pretty big ego trip and I think he thought he needed that boost to reinforce his ambitions. I think she had a great body too.  It was a whirlwind romance.

But my father had an unrelenting subliminal passion to be a medical doctor more than anything in the world.  Mother didn’t perceive or understand the all-consuming, steam rolling passion to go to medical school that boiled within him.  It never crossed her mind that a graduate of veterinary college with a great career ahead had any other passions.  Their whirlwind romance was not long enough or intuitive enough for to understand anything other than what appeared to be.  Ultimately, in a feat of dumb luck that is pretty close to the dumb luck episode that got me into medical school, he managed to squeak into the first class at Baylor School of Medicine, 1943, and their lives changed radically and unpredictably.

Suddenly, she was pregnant with me and they were scrounging for every dime to keep him in school. He was working every odd job he could find after school to pay tuition and expenses, studying all night and she was selling nylon stockings door to door. This wasn’t what she had signed up for and  there were marital problems from then on. She never liked being a doctor’s wife, especially a surgeon’s wife.  He was gone all the time and there was no reliability in his or her life. I remember epic fights in the middle of the night in which he yells=ed “I can’t do anything else…I don’t want to do anything else….this is my life”.

My father swapped out her life in mid-stream into a lethal iteration and she was not able to adapt or accommodate. She did love her kids and she was always there for us, but it was apparent that her life had been a big mistake she hadn’t signed up for and once it started she couldn’t get out of it. I think many times she would have liked to have gone back and changed that course before it began. But it was what it was, as it is for many.

Rest in peace now Mildred Eden Crippen (1918-2012). All things considered, it was a good life.

Rest in peace now Mildred Eden Crippen (1918-2012). All things considered, it was a good life.

She was born precipitously in September of 1947. My dad was a surgical intern at what was then Cleveland City Hospital and we lived in “married student housing” about two blocks from the hospital. I was about four years old and this era is among my earliest forming memories. I vaguely recall the apartment as being bare and austere.  My father, or course was never there. Worked 36 hours on and 12 hours off as a surgical intern. (I did too at Bellevue in 1976-77)  He was paid $100.00 a month plus his food at the hospital and the apartment.  One night my pregnant mother started hemorrhaging per vagina and quickly passed out.  My father said it looked like an open fawcet.  She went into shock immediately and, owning no car, he fireman carried her over his shoulder two blocks to the hospital where they emergently opened her and took the baby. It is only a vague memory. The only reason either her or the baby (Donna) survived was simply because it happened on a night my father happened to be home.

Subsequently, my sister was what you would call “sickly”. Caught every bug that came around. Skinny and looked malnourished. But she had lots of friends in school and managed the social scene reasonably well. She fell in love with her then high school sweetheart and they both proclaimed each other as the loves of their lives. He accidentally drowned in a lake swimming incident in his senior year in six feet of water. Donna never recovered from this and I don’t believe ever again had a love of her life. (Her subsequent marriage in the 80s was an unmitigated disaster.)

She decided to go to nursing school and did so at a “three year” diploma school at the Medical Center of Central Georgia, where she spent the rest of her life and career. In her final year of nursing school she came down with a mysterious metabolic disease creating a hugely enlarged liver and no clear explanation. She had to be helped to the podium to graduate from nursing school. She came very close to death, I’m told. I was in Vietnam. Then for some reason someone put her on an ultra-low fat diet and she got better, but was never near “normal”..

She worked in the first aid tent of the largest rock concert in the country, the Atlanta International Pop Festival in 1970. 600,000 kids headlined by the Allman BrothersShe worked as a scrub nurse at MCCG in Macon, GA and was in the hospital the nights they brought both Duane Allman and Berry Oakley in near death from motorcycle accidents in Macon, a year apart and a block away from each other. She married probably for convenience to an affable but irresponsible guy with a drinking problem, a union that produced one child born premature at 28 weeks and multiple complications including a neonatal subarachnoid hemorrhage and resultant behavioral disasters..

Divorce followed and she essentially spent the rest of her life running interference for this learning disabled child. She was one of the founders of a school for learning disabled children in Macon, and her daughter graduated from there. At some point, inevitably, the daughter entered the parental rebellion phase and got pregnant by one of the other learning disabled students, and they eventually married. He was unable to find work due to a severe reading disability and Donna essentially supported them for years until he was able to get into a school to learn truck driving and got a good job as a local truck driver. They vanished shortly thereafter nd I don’t have any idea where they are today.

Ultimately Donna became weaker and started having trouble walking up stairs. She was again evaluated and a muscle biopsy finally yielded the diagnosis. Limb-girdle-muscular dystrophy, a chronic, debilitating disorder that can occur in females. She then worked as a hospice nurse and a phone referral nurse for doctors, filtering calls from patients calling at night. She was able to work with a minimum of walking. Ultimately the day came when she could no longer get around and was confined to a wheelchair. At this point she applied for disability, and after the usual hoop jumping and bureaucratic hassles designed to limit the number of applicants by inconvenience, she was granted some monthly income from the State.

Then it became clear that disability would not cover her real expenses. I helped her along, as I was able, not clearly understanding the situation at the time. Unbeknownst to me, she lost her car and her house. She was a victim of the utterly contemptible situation in this country where those that have get more and those that don’t do without. On 2/15/08 she complained of a flu bug and told her daughter she was going to take a nap. The daughter went to the store to grocery shop. On her return Donna was found dead in bed. She had been dead several hours and there was no sign of a struggle. She simply went to sleep permanently. I sometimes entertain the notion that she helped this process along at the end, but that will never be proven. I continue to harbor the suspicion that she ended her life by an intentional overdose of pills she had access to, but it will never be proven.

All things considered, I think it was a blessing for her to go to sleep peacefully and not wake up.   The alternative was progressive debilitation and penury. She didn’t ask me for any resources because she probably knew it would only prolong the inevitable. I should have suspected more than I did and been more aggressive in ferreting out what was going on. I might have been able to do something. I will not forgive myself for that selfish lapse.  We were never a terribly “close” family. We were all pretty independent, and that independence manifested itself as not needing family anymore once we struck out on our own. We were always cordial, but we didn’t seek each other out unless we particularly needed to. We saw each other if it was convenient. Otherwise, we didn’t think about each other much. That’s just the way it was and we all accepted it.

And I am sorry for that. Too often, families manipulate each other in thinly veiled power struggles to insure their independence is known, or their anger at another member is expressed in ways that hurt the most.  These manipulations assume an eventual amicable resolution. “I’ll show you, I’ll ignore you, then you’ll pay, and after you pay enough we’ll be OK again”. Then comes the sudden, unexpected finality of death.  Then there is never a way to make any of it right. It’s instantly left hanging at that instant, it can never, ever be resolved by any other manner. There are no “goodbyes”. No “I’m sorrys”. No “I really loved you through it all”. Just a remaining lifetime wishing it had been time to make it different. I cannot tell you the agony I have seen with sons and daughters weeping hysterically at the bedside of a suddenly dead parent because of unresolved issues. I wish I had more time to change the course of this sad situation.

Donna Jean Crippen (1947 – 2008)

Death of a pet: Requiem Lolly

This day had been coming for some time, perhaps from the day he was born in June 1993 when my youngest daughter was 3 years old. On the day of his arrival, my youngest slept on the kitchen floor with him for three days. We all took him for granted, yelled at him for mischief and sometimes secretly wished he would vanish when he got into trouble. We didn’t really notice him aging probably because we didn’t want to. Occasionally I would ask “How old is Lolly?” No one seemed to know.

He was thirteen years old this month, about a year more than usual for standard poodles. Ultimately it became impossible to ignore the ataxia, incontinence, blindness, deafness and confusion anymore. Today I took him to the vet had held him in my arms as a deep, peaceful and permanent sleep took him. It was one of the most wrenchingly painful experiences of my adult life. I wept unabashedly. I had no idea how painful it would be all those years hoping something would occur that would save me from the decision I had to make today.

It was the right thing to do. There was never any question about it being the right thing to do, but that reality did not assuage the searing pain. I tried to bargain with myself to put it off. Today he looked a little brighter. Maybe he would hold on long enough for someone else to step into my position and feel the pain. Maybe the Vet would prescribe something that would make him feel better. Maybe this was just a temporary bug he’s accumulated somewhere and he would perk up in time. Maybe this was only a bad dream and we would both wake up young, vital and in the prime of our lives.

All the same manipulations families of ICU patients make with themselves and their doctors. I begged myself to take him any way I could get him, even if he was in constant pain and discomfort. Anything is better than dead. I would accept his pain so my pain would be lessened. I cursed the guilt I felt over boxing his ears in the past for raiding the garbage can. After it was over, I wanted him back and I cursed myself for the finality of my decision. And I understand better why families of moribund ICU patients make the same bargains and manipulations with themselves and their physicians.

But the reality is that cruelty and selfishness is not a substitute for loving, compassion and endearment. And it is a hard reality to explain to yourself when the alternatives to death whisper sweetly into a receptive ear. It was the right thing to do but it was so painful that avoiding the pain can easily become the object instead of stopping the pain. Lolly found peace and so will I. But not soon.

(Please don’t clutter bandwidth with condolences. Not necessary. I know all your feelings on this and I appreciate all them in absentia)