what's past is prologue

This Thursday my father will have brain surgery at Duke. It will be performed by the same surgeon who operated on mom. I'm trying to prepare, and I thought it would be easier. Having done this exact thing before one might think I have resources, lists, or at least strong memories. But I don't.

I have been going through old journals and paperwork for clues. I found this in a journal I kept the year after mom died:

"One thing they drive home--or you learn along the way--is that this is your new normal. It's not abstract, it's not a possibility, it's not something that happens to other people. And it does become normal. The comical, the painful, the bizarre become normal. And as quickly as it came, it's gone. Grief is the new normal, and the treatment is not nearly as simple. You're changed irrevocably. There is no cure, and there is no relief such as death. Grief is huge, suffocating, and stinging. After a while its edges are less sharp. Eventually there are thoughts, moments, when you wonder 'is this the grief? The thing that passes? Or is this who I am now?' The normal shifts, plates moving slowly under the surface. Months later, when you spontaneously begin sobbing--is that the grief? Or is this a thing now? Do I just cry like this every once in a while? Fold it into my day-to-day? The edges  are fuzzy. Like the disease, I need grief to keep its form, to remain a solid mass, no matter how toxic."

 What will it be like the second time?

Deja vu

Four years later I get a text from my dad about a migraine, hospital admittance, and "something" showing up on a brain scan. The doctors are fairly certain it is a tumor, can't be sure of the kind until surgery. Located in his left temporal lobe.

This is...I don't have the words.





Deja vu by Monika Furmaniak.

nightmare

This morning, for the first time in a very long time, I had a nightmare. There were many components that would make for excellent dream translation fodder, but the important thing was this: in my dream I was arguing with someone. I had apparently scratched his truck. Mom was there defending me. As the argument grew louder, I shouted at him that I had just left my mothers' funeral and, for christ's sake, would he give me a freakin' break.

First of all, we didn't have a funeral for mom, and while I'm sure there's a lot to be read into that, it isn't what I wanted to share. It's that in my dream my mother was both alive and dead. It's the very core of my psyche/subconscious/etc processing the fact that something so permanent has disappeared. That existence has been changed irrevocably. Try to imagine not having one of your hands, by birth or accident, whatever. And now imagine that you're dreaming about clapping at a baseball game, all the while talking to the person next to you about how you lost your hand. It is very plainly, at least to me, the processing of trauma. I studied psychology for years, read all about phantom limb syndrome, PTSD, so on and so forth, but to experience it is something else entirely...



Image: John Henry Fuseli's "The Nightmare," 1781.

paperwork

Although North Carolina has a handy pamphlet for those new to executing estates, it is comprised mostly of legalese copy and pasted from NC General Statutes. I thought I'd share here the process I have gone through involving the court to help others. So here goes my attempt at simplifying the probate process.

Below I've included the numbers of the forms here in NC. If you're confused about something in your own state, you can look these forms up online (just google the number) and it should help to clarify your own process.

1. From your funeral home or crematorium you need two important things: a copy of the paid funeral bill, and one or more death certificates. Expect to pay around $10 per certified copy. You will need several of these, but the number depends on how many accounts, properties, etc the decedent owned.

2. Go to the county courthouse and find the Estates office, usually around the Clerk of Court as it is under its purview. Bring at least $200 in cash. Yes, it costs money to file these damn forms.

3. Forms! I did the following all in one sitting so they might not be ordered appropriately below.
---You will file a very easy form called Certificate of Probate, NC form AOC-E-304. You will need the original notarized will as well as a certified death certificate.
--At the same time you should be sworn in as the executor or executrix. The necessary form is called the Application for Probate and Letters (NC AOC-E-201). It will ask for some basic info about the deceased.
--The next form for this part is Oath/Affirmation, (NC AOC-E-400).
--Finally, you file a form called Order Authorizing Issuance of Letters (NC AOC-E-402).

4. Whew. So now you should be dandy and the deputy clerk assisting you will give you Letters Testatmentary (NC AOC-E-403). You will want several of these--this is your legal proof that your are the executor.

5. Now what? You need to file a notice to creditors in your local paper. Ask the deputy clerk about this as it might be different in other states. In NC it has to run for 30 days, then a notarized affidavit is sent to the executor and the court. Bring a copy of your Letters and the death certificate.

6. You also need to fill out and file the Inventory for Decedent's Estate (NC AOC-E-505). This is exactly what it sounds like. All the accounts without direct beneficiaries, household goods, etc. I believe you have about 3 months to complete this and return it to the Estates office. While you're there again (bring cash), make sure they received the affidavit from the newspaper. If not, have them make a copy of yours. While they're at it, have them make a copy of the paid funeral bill (they need it for their files).

7. So, even though the whole notice to creditors thing should have been covered by now, there is a form. It is called Affidavit of Notice to Creditors (NC AOC-E-307). This basically says you tried looking for people to whom the decedent owed money (i.e. the ad in the paper). Boom. Easy.

8. You'll file an Estate Tax Certification (NC AOC-E-212) with the deputy clerk as well. The details of this may vary by state, but it determines whether or not state Estate tax is due.

9. Finally (as far as I know) you'll file the Final Account or Annual Account (NC AOC-E-506). This wraps up the probate process. It takes the estate's worth from the original inventory and adds/subtracts anything that has happened since you filed that inventory. So, if you had to pay an ambulance bill, that would be subtracted from the estate (assuming you paid from an estate account, which you need to set up with the decedent's bank). Keep proof/receipts for payments made to creditors--the court would like copies included. I believe you have about a year before this annual account is due.

And that, I hope, is everything for the court. Financial and tax stuff are another matter....

the end

Mom died a little after 4pm on January 29th. I was sitting by her side playing a computer game, but she had been unresponsive for a couple days so I'm not sure if she knew. Every few moments I would look over to check if she was still breathing, as it had become irregular over the previous few days. Sometimes she would stop for a few moments, then start again. I watched her chest but it didn't rise. I sat next to her, put my hand on her chest, took her hand in my other. Her fingers were blue. I don't know why but I took a picture of them. I cried a bit, tried to close her eyelids or her mouth, but she'd become too gaunt and they remained slack. I stepped into the hall of the hospice facility and asked the nurse to come check mom, but she knew what I meant.

Friends and family have come and gone, mom has been cremated, her ashes are still in the plastic box from the crematorium, sitting on the kitchen counter. I've started the estate process, cancelled accounts, transferred assets, taken inventories. It's been two months.

I've learned a lot over those last two months, and this blog was supposed to help others in the same situation, but it might be a while before I can collect my thoughts and turn them into something useful to others. As of right now I'm absolutely useless.

to cry out and be held

Almost two weeks ago the hospice nurse and I decided that mom should transfer to the inpatient facility; I was quickly becoming unable to care for her physically, limited by my strength and size. That afternoon an ambulance came and brought her here, to the Hock Family Pavilion, one of Duke Hospice's inpatient locations. It's beautiful, the people are wonderful, and it's close to home. Mom was foggy and that first day said she was a little scared so I stayed the night in her room on a cot. It's hard for me to write that now as it has been days since she has been able to speak, or communicate in any way, really. She opens her eyes occasionally but doesn't really see me. I speak to her (they say hearing is the last sense to go) and ask her to squeeze my hand, but it doesn't happen. No more sleepy smiles, either, when the nurses come in. This is creeping death.

It could come at any time now, they say. I suppose I should be sleeping here, or spending more of my day here, but I haven't. And maybe there aren't any "shoulds" when it comes to watching a parent die. I spoke yesterday with one of the social workers here and told her it was remarkable that we don't have a more streamlined process for the dying. It's bulky. Cold bodies moved around, so many papers to sign, accounts to cancel, the bevy of supporters from whom you know you can't possibly ask anything.

I speak to her, tell her about my day, that people send their well wishes. I tell her about how the cats are driving me nuts and that I've started dating a nice boy. I tell her that he bought flowers for her, but I was too much of a mess to bring him here to say hello, even if she couldn't hear him.

I wanted part of this blogging project to include helpful tidbits that I wish I'd known along the way, but right now I'm not sure what I could communicate. The logistics of brain cancer had been such a distraction. Perhaps another time I will be able to write about hospice and making final arrangements.


Image: Jean-Philippe Charbonnier's 1954 photograph of a wailing woman in a Parisian psychiatric hospital.  Link.

bump in the night

I heard a thud. I ran to her room shouting "mama?!" No reply, but when I rounded the corner I found her awkwardly jammed between her door and the closet; something between the full locust and the camel pose, for those who know anything about yoga. I don't. I just looked it up. She looked like a fish. No, a whale. They way they flip back after jumping from the water. She was bent the wrong way, her head facing the ceiling and mashed against the door, her body curved backward so that the front of her hips rested on the floor, her feet behind her against the closet. I thought for sure she had broken her back--it didn't seem a survivable position for a healthy person, let alone someone so weak. I was able to lay her down, but on her stomach, and she refused to move. She wouldn't or couldn't tell me where the pain was. She turned on her side and let out a raspy sigh. Her eyes were glazed and she was staring at a point past the wall, not uncommon. In that moment, though, I truly thought she had died. I thought she had died contorted like a dolphin yogi after falling in her room when I was twenty feet away.

The hospice nurse is on her way. It's 11:30 pm on a Friday, but like they told me, "CALL HOSPICE FIRST." 

She's back in bed now. Apparently the pain was from extreme constipation. Last month it was puddles of diarrhea on the floor, now it's back-breaking constipation. 

"Could've been worse," she says. Things could always be worse, I suppose, but not much more than this. Yeah, this whole situation it pretty awful.



Image: Caspar David Friedrich's "Wanderer above the Sea of Fog," 1818.  This is how I'd like to feel.