Dancing With My Mother

I didn’t drive to Evansville to attend the will signings. I needed to visit my parents and it was by chance our close family friend, Bambi (nee Evelyn), had scheduled the signings for that week.

For the trip to the law office, Bambi loaded us all, Helen in the front seat, Mack and I in the back, into her purple Scion with the 1983 vintage Grateful Dead sticker on the rear passenger side window. In my father’s upcoming defense, he was not fully aware of what awaited him. Or he’d forgotten about the prep work begun one year ago.

Bambi entertained us with stories as I watched houses and storefronts whiz by and my father fidgeted. We arrived at the law office, near, appropriately enough, Normandy Street, and Bambi parked the car as I helped my mother through the glass doors.

My father is still my father. He continues to shovel his snow and his immediate neighbors’ (though it takes hours), but my mother is now the frailest person I know. The walkered walk from the car to the conference room provided enough time to comment on the wallpaper, swirly, the carpet, patterned, and the civil war photos on the wall, many of the dour, but honest, Abe.

We were seated at a long mahogany table with two middle aged women, both employees of the Elder Law Attorney, who distributed the documents and served as witnesses to their signings. The documents included: A Durable Power of Attorney, a Living Will and what I’d come to call the Will Will. Instantly, my father reacted to what he called a “Trap.” “Who in their right mind would sign something he had not yet read?” he asked, his voice rising. This, while the dutiful schoolgirl, my mother, busily added her Helen Virginia to all the dotted lines.

Mack wouldn’t sign the living will or the durable power doc because he didn’t trust either his doctor or his daughter to govern the end of his life. “Mack, I said, “If you don’t trust a family member how about if I find a stranger to fill in? Someone walking by outside, for instance?” To which my mother answered, “Yeah, how about Dan Downing?” And he wouldn’t sign the will will because…I don’t know.

Truthfully, I’m not sure he understood the papers in front of him. He aired an example of a friend who, without having a living will, died a peaceful death twenty years ago. “It was a beautiful thing,” he said.

Wasting no time, Bambi ( a lawyer in her own right) stood up and said, “Mack if you’re not comfortable signing these papers you can take them home and read them.” Ever the polite negotiator, she’d removed the extra fuel tanks from the launching rocket. Of course this was the sensible thing to say and do, once you’d given up on the process completing itself.

My mother felt embarrassed (she said so later), but I didn’t. It was, to me, a reasonable reaction (one my life has been littered with), and besides, I knew those assembled to witness the signing had been part of far more dramatic theatre.

But not embarrassed does not mean unconscious, which I’d have to have been to let these moments slip by without comment. Helen looked up from her papers and said to her husband of some seventy years, “Honey, you wouldn’t want to linger in a hospital, would you?” Mack didn’t answer, but I did. “You know, mom, if you really felt that way, I should be the one who decides what happens to you if you’re incapacitated, not Joan. She’ll keep you alive, at least until the money runs out. You know I wouldn’t.”

Helen, as if she suspected my follow up, slipped me that all knowing smile and said, “You’re right. You wouldn’t use anything artificial to keep me alive.”

“Are your papers signed?”

“Yes”

“No I wouldn’t, and I’ve come to consider room air artificial.”