While we're waiting, I observe that Mom does seem somewhat out of it. Dad's convinced that he knows all the signs, and that she's just had another stroke. Marlen meanwhile is nowhere to be found, has obviously wandered away somewhere, possibly off of his property entirely. So without knowing anything about the place, or getting input from anyone else, I locate what seems to be nearest hospital, Holmes Regional Medical Center, and have it pulled up on the map app on my phone. I'm standing to the right of her, holding her up with a hand on her shoulder, and just before he returns and we leave, the last thing she says to me is mumbling, “Jason, you shouldn't be chasing women around.”
Startled by this thoroughly off the wall comment, I chuckle and tell her, “no, I'm not, Mom.”
Dad returns and we put her shoes on. As she will continue to do, she protests that we don't need to take her to the hospital, she just needs more rest. But we press onward, as I open the front door and Dad carries her out, then repeat this as he loads her into the back seat of his truck.
It says on Google Maps that this hospital is 8 minutes away, but I feel like we make it in less. Dad is flooring it, and he's also able to scoot through some red lights, “California” style, when nobody is coming.
He pulls up in front of Emergency and hops out to go get help. I climb out and open Mom's door while we wait, to speed the process as much as possible. She's still talking about not needing to be here and just wanting to go back to the house and rest.
Though considerably impressed with this place overall, I have to say the ones working the front door here are not the most responsive bunch in the world. Dad has to grab a wheelchair himself and come out with it, as the two employees just stood where they were and pointed them out to him. They are friendly enough, though – this black dude doing metal/weapon screenings, and this older woman named Cindy doing the check-in paperwork.
A young, good looking girl in scrubs, with curly, long blondish-brown hair – I think she was a doctor – comes out to wheel Mom away to a room. I only talk to her briefly. But she's asking Dad and me, as though highly skeptical, what makes us think that Mom has had a stroke. So this shows you how quickly everything went downhill.
Back in the room, she is still talking some, though out of it. They would only let one person back there with her, so that is obviously Dad, as I'm stuck chilling in the waiting room. But she apparently asks him where Daniel went, among other off-kilter remarks. She's also throwing up some more back here early on. By the time I am finally permitted to join them, she's just making gagging sounds now and is completely out of it otherwise.
The dude bebopping around, basically a nurse I think, tells us his parents used to live near Murphy, NC. His urgency is impressive, as he flies around the room at a million miles an hour, checking and unplugging things, getting ready to set these wheels in motion, as they have already determined she needs to be moved up to ICU. Then he is positively flying up the halls, pushing her bed, as Dad and I commend him on his speed, attempt to keep up with him. Even as he scoffs and says this is nothing, for him, because he's known for going even faster.
So he steers us up to the ICU area, on the 4th floor. We have to wait around a little bit while they get her hooked up here. And as soon as they do, and we are brought in, this is when we first learn the severity of what has happened here today. She went downhill really fast; in fact, they can tell that she did indeed have another stroke, this one with brain bleeding, and that the bleeding got much worse just in the time it took to wheel her up here from Emergency. This doctor we haven't seen before, Dr. Shafer, pulls us aside and breaks the news right away, with no sugar coating.
“This isn't going to end well,” he says.
Dad immediately breaks down and has to walk away. So I'm left standing here as Shafer fills me in on the details. Her brain is bleeding, which pushes everything else out of that space, and they can't really operate because she's on blood thinners.
So this is obviously just completely horrible. We did not see this coming. Dad and I go into the nearby conference room and cry and walk around shaking our heads, as we attempt to console each other, hug, et cetera.
Shafer isn't the actual brain surgeon, though, so we wait for that doctor to show up and talk to us. His last name is pronounced “Theo-doshious.”
Her blood pressure had been through the roof down there in Emergency, and that's one thing they managed to somewhat stabilize. Up here, they basically had no choice but to induce a coma and put her on life support while we decide what to do.
Theodoshious comes in and explains the situation to us. He apologizes for being blunt but you can tell he's actually a really good guy. He's this middle aged dude with glasses, shorter salt and pepper hair, either tanned or naturally dark skinned or both. He tells us there is a procedure he could theoretically try, but all that would do is help keep her alive on life support, and might not work anyway. He says if this were his family member, he would not operate.
So it's decided. We are not doing this. We're obviously still having a rough time coming to grips with this situation, though. Some spiky haired older woman who works here comes in to see how we're doing, asks Dad if he wants a shot of tequila. Also, the main nurse overseeing Mom, Rebecca, who often gets choked up and teary eyed herself when talking to us, is in to check on us and deliver updates frequently.
But now we have to decide what to do. Rick's funeral will be starting soon, and we're supposed to be there. They will probably start blowing up one or more of our phones at some point, wondering what happened to us. Yet we agree it's best to wait before telling anyone on that side of the family, until after Rick's ceremony is over.
By now it's around 10:30, and I think Dad has talked to Marlen by now. He had already stumbled upon the puke in the bed, saw we were gone, knew this was nothing good and threw all the bedding in the wash. While presumably continuing to pace around his compound and probably crack open the first beer(s) of the day. Other than him, then, the first person to find out is when I call Erin. So of course I'm crying as I break the news to her, and she's just as shocked, starts crying too. And then immediately starts looking into a flight down here.
Up next is Daniel. Dad's not feeling up to it, so I make the call. For some reason my phone will not call his, despite multiple tries, so I use Dad's. So Daniel's pretty broken up when I deliver the news. He and his wife, Christina, immediately start planning to drive down here too.
Rebecca's discussing with us exactly what we wish to do. She feels bad for putting Mom on life support without consulting us first, but felt she had to at that moment.
“No, that was perfect!” I tell her, and she starts crying again.
She feels bad because she did it without asking. But that was totally the right call in the moment. And now we discuss where to go from here – like if Mom's heart should for some reason stop beating, not to do chest compressions. “I'm afraid that would break her ribs,” Rebecca says, and we agree with that.
So basically, once we figure Rick's funeral must be breaking up, we start calling people on that side of the family. We have decided to just keep Mom alive long enough for everyone to say their goodbyes. Allie and Karen say they'll be right over, sometime this afternoon; Dewane and Mona are driving straight down from their home on the North Carolina coast, and should be here by tomorrow morning; Erin's flying into Sanford on Allegiant around 2; Daniel and Christina are driving and will be here tonight.
Dad and I drive back to Marlen's for a bit. Then I take his truck up to Sanford to get Erin. Due to the recent hurricane, the governor, DeSantis, has suspended all tolls, state-wide, for the time being. So we just zip right through the booths. There's this really cool bridge over a big lake, beautiful (Lake Norman I-77 setup, sort of, but on a much larger scale) just before the airport exit.
I was already suspecting Erin will probably not want to stay at Marlen's – just a hunch. At one point, when we stop at that gas station at the end of his road for more supplies, she breaks down crying in the middle of the store. Then we get over to Marlen's place, where our host is freaking about having not just us but also Daniel and Christina and their dog, Elle, all somehow lodging in this tiny place. To me this settles it.
“I can't have all these people here, now!” he keeps saying, and variations thereof.
But then also Dad, who I understand is out of his head right now, is getting on me for some strange reason that I need to figure out a dog friendly hotel around here for Daniel. But I'm like, not my problem, sorry. If Daniel had asked me to, that might be different. Then Dad's surprised when Erin and I book our own room – my thinking is, maybe Daniel and Christina can stay here, maybe not, but I'm not going to “hog” this space, so to speak, when it would be easier for us to book a room for ourselves. Then Daniel and Christina can arrive and maybe crash here, and either way that's not on me.
And Erin wants more space regardless. Pulling up options now, I manage to luck into this sweet deal on a room. With taxes and everything, it's less than $100 a night, for 2 nights thus far.
Allie and Karen arrive here mid afternoon, shortly after I arrive back in town with Erin, and accompanied by my cousins, Tonya and Tabatha. So here's a great spot for the next set of explanations concerning convoluted family history. Allie is one of my mom's younger brothers – I've long suspected he would be the last one alive, from her and her siblings, and it's certainly playing out that way. She was one of seven children, and there's a neat symmetry there, in that it went two boys, three girls, two boys; not only that but Dewane and Gene were born in Ohio, the three girls (Donna Sue, Mom, Cissy) in Delaware, then Allie and Lyle in Florida. Allie is not just the second-youngest but also, by whatever weird fluke causes these unique boiling cauldrons of traits that we call “personalities,” he also somehow ended up as probably the most straight-laced of the bunch.
In fact he's a retired homicide detective, and one of the more improbable late career boons that went with that job is that he's appeared on television often, on such true crime shows as Body Of Evidence and Grave Secrets. On his local nightly news, he was in a montage clip that aired at the beginning every night, where he was taking down this suspect who screamed, “I’m a natural born killer!”
Personality wise, he has that whole thing down to a tee which it seems like cops can pull off better than anyone, coming off as hilarious and intimidating all at once. He is both the funniest of my mom's siblings but also the most serious, which otherwise wouldn't seem to make sense – except for some reason I'm always thinking about the character Rob Riggle played in The Hangover, that kind of vibe, a trait very specific it would seem to his profession. Or former profession, I guess we should say. Since retiring from the force, he's started up his own power washing business, for which Rick has been his most consistently dependable employee.
Karen is his second wife, though once again they've also been married for almost 40 years. She's half Mexican, or thereabouts, and Dad bestowed the nickname “Beaner” upon her eons ago, though he is the only one who uses it. She too is a mostly hilarious, squat, somewhat roundish type lady who has always been nothing but kind to us. And then Tonya and Tabatha are my biological cousins from his first marriage. Meanwhile, Karen had the three boys as a product of her own first marriage, Scott, Jason, and Rick. The dad is apparently a deadbeat, however, and Allie long since formally adopted the boys as his own, at which point they also changed their last name to Roberts.
Tonya somehow has five grandchildren, and Tabatha one, which I still can't believe. Both because they're roughly the same age as my brother and me, and we are nowhere near that status ourselves...but also because somehow concurrently, in my mind, they're all (Daniel, my cousins, et cetera) vaguely in the mid-twenties still. I continue to think of them as such. Despite all being in their forties now, same as me.
Alternately checking in on Mom, we also stand around in the hallway, in between the elevators and the cheerful waiting room on the 4th floor, just getting caught up. Everyone except Dad, who is all over the place, everywhere but here. Obviously what happened to Mom is horrific, but I feel like we have to keep it together and not make a dramatic show – because Allie and Karen just lost their son. Nobody has come right out and said what Rick's cause of death was, and possibly don't even know for sure just yet, but he's had a long history of drug problems, and although he seemed to be doing much better in recent years, we are all just sort of assuming this must have been the culprit, without coming right out and asking.
Allie and Karen are telling me I did an awesome job uploading these old family videos to Youtube, ones dating from Allie's 50th birthday party celebrations down here about 15 years ago. They're asking me how I did this, going from the old handheld video camera tapes to the computer and then online, seem fascinated by this process. Then Karen gets on this kick talking about me as a little kid.
“He was so smart!” she tells Erin, “we thought he was gonna grow up to be a scientist!”
Which is always very flattering to hear and all. Except lost in these discussions is the fact that I never had any interest in being a scientist. Or a doctor, or a lawyer. Or anything, really, except this. While I have plenty of regrets in life, none of them are career related – unless maybe you count my not being retired completely, which I'd hoped and seriously thought would be the case by now. But then at some point, even this no longer bothered me, because I began to think of all this bizarro job hopping as a stealthy kind of superpower. It's been interesting, and highly educational, and beyond all that given me seemingly unlimited fuel for my various writing projects. I mean, even a writer as mind-numbingly great and prolific as Stephen King is surprisingly constricted in this regard. When, chances are, you crack open his latest novel and the discover main character is, spoiler alert, a novelist. He doesn't really know a ton about most other lines of work. Some of these jobs have been unbelievably stupid, but I can't say I didn't learn anything about the inner workings of various professions.
When our mini reunion here runs its course, Erin and I call Emma. Dad shouts out a hello in the background. She's my daughter and Erin's stepdaughter, sixteen years old now, and though she got to know her Grandma Jan extremely well over the years, has very little to say at this moment. Meanwhile, Dad calls Mom's other living sibling, Gene, while I reverse roles by chiming in with a background hello. He too doesn't have much to say, either. And then of course the phone calls on down the line to his side of the family, and friends, although for some reason he asks me to text Paul Knackstedt because he can’t handle that.
Allie and his crew depart for Cocoa Beach, with plans for everyone to meet back over here tomorrow. With one vehicle in play for us, considering that Marlen hasn't exactly volunteered to drive anybody anywhere, Erin and I drop Dad off over there, so that we can use his truck. Enter the next strange twist of this odyssey, one which will become more and more surreal as this week progresses, when we drive over to the hotel and I duck inside to get the key for our room.
I don't typically go for a bunch of mystical or philosophical or religious mumbo-jumbo, but certain episodes certainly leave you questioning what's really going on, here. Sometimes you can't help but wonder, did this even exist before I came here? As though reality is snapping into place directly ahead of you, based upon the path you are charting. This hotel is on the main drag in Melbourne. It looks brand new and spotless, tastefully modern in its décor, and yet even so, the pieces themselves seem a little off. Like these hardwood type floors and fancy, light blue upholstered chairs in the lobby, bright lighting, and relatively austere decorating scheme otherwise. I don't recall ever setting foot in any lodging situation, anywhere, which looked anything like this. Those chairs for example look brand new yet a hundred years old at the same time. I get it that there are some Halloween decorations in place already, but you can’t quite chalk it all up to that. It will also turn out later that we paid much less for a larger suite than anybody else was getting for totally ordinary rooms, anywhere else up and down this strip.
And as for the help, it's this older black woman behind the counter, some black dude who works in a janitorial capacity or thereabouts, standing beside it. The two of them were playfully squabbling as I entered, but stop as I approach, as she begins processing my information and he mostly just stands there, smiling kind of absently, with his hands maybe even behind his back. No other human enters the room at any point – I don't know, the whole setup has this spooky, spartan vibe like straight out of an original Twilight Zone episode. And what totally caps it off is that Alice In Chains' Nutshell is playing for some reason on their Muzak.
Then we check into our room and it's more of this same weirdness. The door opens into the first chamber, which is for all intents the living room, with a full-blown kitchen beyond. There's a couch, TV, table, full-sized fridge, sink, microwave, and everything else you could want in here, i.e. this is in all likelihood better than some apartments I've rented. That without even getting into the second room beside, where two queen sized beds await, dressers, another large flat screen TV with all the standard cable offerings. A dark chamber with modern white slat blinds, too, located on the backside of this facility, in other words afternoon naps should present no problems.
Or for that matter crashing into bed come nightfall, which is what we do, soon enough.
As it turns out, Daniel and Christina arrive in town at some point tonight. They found a dog friendly hotel en route – the dog in question, Elle, being the reason they did not fly – only to arrive here, find themselves embroiled in some sort of dispute with the desk clerk, and wind up canceling their reservation. They then booked a much smaller room than us, improbably enough, right next door, yet paying more per night for it. I don't care about any of that obviously, though it only adds to the surreal nature of our unexpected find over here – and also, I have this strange hunch that all this extra space is going to play a pivotal role before our stay here is said and done, and it turns out I'm right about that.
They also made their way up to the hospital to see Mom, of course, though otherwise we are waiting for the morning, October 10th. Dewane and Mona drove about halfway down last night, before getting a room, and continue the rest of the way today.
Dewane is Mom's oldest sibling – by quite a bit, as you might expect to be the case when talking about seven children – and has basically projected major big brother vibes, almost like the patriarch of the family even when their own dad was still around. He's exceedingly chill, unflappable, soft spoken and hard to read, all traits that were well established before his hearing actually began to give out about twenty years ago. Although he also confessed to some of us at one point, with a reluctant grin, that he got “tired of talking” somewhere along the line, which is why he tends to say very little, even less than he had before. However, if you're reading this and thinking these all add up to some spectacular traits for a poker player, then you would not be wrong.
Mona, meanwhile, is his sixth wife. Yes, you read that correctly. Well, technically speaking, she is just his fifth wife, though he has been married six times – one of those was a repeat offender. Any way you slice it, though, that's an incongruous number, particularly when considering how laid-back Dewane has always been. Then again, you often wonder if “laid-back” is not necessarily a trait that women are looking for, at least not long term, if that proves a little too dull for their drama seeking tendencies. I have certainly found myself wondering this, on occasion, about my own endeavors in this vein, particularly as us laid-back guys by default seem to wind up with more shrill and aggressive types, a large percentage of the time.
It all reminds me of this conversation we once had, years ago, at Dewane's kitchen table, at his and Mona's first house together up in Ontario, Ohio. Daniel and I were sitting there bemoaning our female troubles, with Dewane the only other figure present, though he was just hanging out and not saying much.
“You should be glad you're not dating these days,” I eventually said to him, “these chicks are crazy!”
His face broadened into a wide grin and he calmly declared, “oh, they were plenty crazy back then, too, believe me...”
As for Mona, she's rambunctious, and highly energetic, but in all the right ways. The instant most of us met her, we thought, yes, this one is going to stick. Maybe that's retrofitting an outcome onto instinct, yet the feeling was almost universal – and I don't recall anyone thinking that about wives #3, 4, or 5. At any rate, they’ve lasted at this point almost exactly 30 years, so the marriage has proven a success.
They arrive at the hospital at roughly the same time Allie, Karen, Tonya, and Tabatha do, while the rest of us (sans Marlen of course) are already here. At some point Dad and Daniel knock back a quick beer in the parking garage. Then Dad rustles up this preacher who works out of the hospital, this really nice older guy who hails from somewhere in South America. He swings by her bedside to conduct a baptism ceremony, because Dad K says she somehow never went through this process. While this is going on, Erin’s actually wondering if this could possibly be true, though, and texts Dad M, who responds that she was already baptized, at this lake in Galion - but we keep this to ourselves, see no reason to upset the apple cart here.
When the preacher is finished, he leaves the little red blanket he used to baptize Mom. And now we’re just waiting for the nurse, Rebecca, to make her arrangements for pulling the plug. Allie and Dewane are cracking up talking about Gene, the brother born between them, who has legitimate claims to being the most mysterious figure, period, on this side of the family.
“He never says I love you, you ever notice that?” Allie says, chortling heartily.
This is when I mention something Dad said earlier, about how it might actually be nice to be more like Gene, i.e. halfway disconnected from reality most of the time. In more modern times, we think Gene almost surely has to be planted squarely on the autism spectrum somewhere. When I was growing up, though, they phrased his condition with complete seriousness as his having been born with “water on the brain,” this truly terrifying sounding accident which occurred at birth. Everyone explained him away in this manner. While it’s safe to dismiss that as hokum nowadays, we don’t have any official diagnosis in its place. He is insanely smart in some regards but completely ignorant of many basic things; he’s the kind of guy who held down a job as a prison guard for 30 years, can tell you every state capital, every president and vice president in order…yet at the same time, as we’re laughing about now, when Tonya graduated high school, he notoriously gave her a card that said, Congratulations Nephew!
Tonya and Tabatha are both so shook up that they have to leave the room while Rebecca begins pulling the plug, though they soon return. I’m holding Mom’s right foot, Allie her left. Dewane is up by her left shoulder, and is taking this especially hard - as I imagine anyone would in his shoes, the oldest of seven siblings, who has now outlived four of them. You’re almost like a semi-parent, I think. And of course it’s tough for me, too, but I feel like I’m trying to keep it together on behalf of everyone else. Tonya is in between me and Allie, and rests her head on my shoulders. At Dad’s request, I pull up Willie Nelson’s Angel Flying Too Close To The Ground, and play that from my phone, resting it on the red blanket.
Mom was just 4’10” and I’m sure she almost never weighed even 100 pounds. Yet as Dad K says now, “she was the toughest person I have ever known.” I have thought something similar about all my parents, actually, that they are just badasses, always have been, and it’s set a pretty high bar to aspire to. And of course an excellent example. The last 25 years or so mostly did not go her way at all, much of which was completely random and unfair, but she kept her chin up and battled through it all anyway. Now this part of the journey is over.
Rebecca has said she believes that patients in a coma can hear what people say, they just can’t respond. Most of us agree with this and we’re talking to her throughout. As we are as all the vital signs drop to zero. Then it’s over, although in a kind, touching gesture, Rebecca prints out tiny paper slips showing Mom’s heartbeat, and puts them in vials for each of us to have.
Oddly enough, however, she can’t find the ankle bracelet that Mom always wears. She seriously never takes the thing off. Now nobody can quite remember if she had it on at any point while here at the hospital. It will turn up days later back at their house, once we finally return to North Carolina - just another strange turn in a thoroughly outrageous, shocking week. One that in some respects has only just begun.
