To Whom it May Concern:

Here is the letter your office requested about my brother Harold and the events of ten years ago.

My brother is an alcoholic. He lived in the basement apartment in my mother’s house, or at least he did until we had to put her in a nursing home. At that point he moved upstairs into my old room and tried to keep the property up as best he could, which wasn’t very well because he was never a neat or industrious person, even before he became “ill,” as my mother used to say before she lost her ability to speak. Be that as it may, it was a lot better than having the house go empty and attract all sorts of vandals and the like. It also kept me from having to come home more than was absolutely necessary.

Harold had e-mailed me and my sisters and asked if we could meet at the house on Sunday afternoon to discuss my mother’s condition, seeing as how she’d always urged us to stick together and make decisions as a family. Since he rarely made any demands, at least on me, I told him I would come, even though it meant flying in at last-minute rates. It wasn’t really an imposition, as I was overdue for a visit with my mother anyway, and it was even less of a big deal for my sisters, who all live out in the suburbs across town. Nevertheless, they kicked up a big fuss, what with yoga, soccer practice, swimming lessons, band practice, etc., etc. Dee Dee had a date to play tennis. She’s my oldest sister and we all prayed, still do, for her to have dates, because otherwise she’s a pain. Charlie did this, Charlie did that, then left her holding the bag, which isn’t exactly true because what he did was die of a heart attack in the middle of having sex with a girl in his office, which I should clarify to mean she worked in his office and they were also having sex in his office. My middle sister is June, like the month of June, when she was born, so my mother and father named her that, and she became the fair-minded one among us, like an economist with two arms, as they say. It never made much sense to me or to my youngest sister, Emily-the-emotional, Emote for short; I was born in January and she, Emote, was born in March, and they, my parents, didn’t name us January and March.

So those are my sisters — none of them exactly what you’d order from an Athleta catalogue, but my sisters. They agreed to come to the house at 2:30 in the afternoon, but only for an hour, and just so long as it meant they could skip their normal visits to the nursing home, which they said would be okay in that my mother rarely recognized them anymore. She probably wouldn’t even be awake, not that it made any difference to them because they talked baby-talk to her either way, did mumkins have a good night, did she sleep well, can I get her anything?

When mother was awake, they’d feed her sugarless Hershey bars (she had diabetes) and apple slices as long as they were there to make her carefully chew them. In addition to the diabetes, my mother also had congestive heart failure, asthma, dementia, Parkinson’s and kidney disease, all of which contributed to a degree of pain requiring constant narcotic medications. About twice a year, the medications would build up in her system and she’d become psychotic, which was a problem when she was up and around because she’d attack the nurse aides with a plastic fork. It ceased to be an issue after she became totally bedridden. After that when she went off, they just strapped her down until the EMTs could come and take her to the hospital, where they’d put her in a room by herself and take her off all her drugs. She’d come back a week later all black and blue, but otherwise fine, or at least as fine as you could be when you were ninety-four years old and the “last of the Mohicans,” as my mother used to say when she could still talk. She also used to say she wanted to go and be with my father, which suited all of us just fine because at that point he’d had fifteen years of largely undeserved peace since his own passing.

I relay all this so you’ll understand that my mother was a very sick, very old woman who’d already been placed in hospice three times.

When my mother had her first stroke, none of us thought she’d make it through the night, much less live six more years. Dr. Woodruff, who was and still is our family doctor, said it was due to her being a good eater. She ate all the time, three meals a day, morning noon and night, and he said that as long as she kept eating, she’d keep living, at least until some dark and rainy night, when she would just implode, “buy the farm,” I remember him saying, which was a dumb thing to say as by that time she didn’t have enough money to buy a bus ticket home. The house technically didn’t even belong to her anymore. We’d bought it from her for $25 so Medicaid couldn’t come and get it after she died, and deprive us of our only inheritance. It worked out okay because Harold got to live there rent free, a real help to him since he was never able to keep a job after his wife divorced him and threw all his stuff out in the street. My sisters and I did have to pay the taxes on the house and for repairs.

It was no big deal for me, being that I was a highly-skilled insurance adjuster, a recession-free profession (luckily for me, people don’t stop having car wrecks and running over pedestrians every time the economy goes south). Not so for my sisters or my brother. They all said the nursing home was putting them in the poorhouse. We’d done a spend-down on my mother years before, meaning we used up all of her savings so she could qualify for Medicaid. Still and all, the meter was constantly running for the girls, my sisters — diapers, sugarless chocolates, shampoo, deodorants, Christmas and birthday gifts, all the driving back an forth and who knew where gasoline prices would stop. I’m not saying the expenses had anything to do with what happened, God forbid, but it could have been a factor, although I feel compelled to note that Harold usually rode with one of them, inasmuch as his previous DUI convictions prevented him from driving.

Once we’d all seated ourselves around what had been mother’s dining room table, Harold introduced his new girlfriend, Heather. The table leaf wasn’t in place, so the five of us were so close together our heads almost touched. When our mouths opened for whatever reason, you could pretty well tell what we’d each had for lunch. I remember marking down fish for Dee Dee.

Harold blurted out, and I can quote him here directly, “Heather’s a Registered Nurse, a hospice nurse, and she thinks we should go ahead and kill mother.”

“I never said kill her, I said euthanize her,” Heather said, her voice the chirp of a small bird, perhaps a wren or a swallow, I wouldn’t know which, June being the bird person in our family.

I wasn’t sure at the time which was the most shocking, Harold having a girlfriend, or his girlfriend proposing to dispatch our mother, but we were all instantly put on edge, a family set against itself, so to speak. My sister Emily was pretty indignant and she asked Heather, who in the face actually looked a lot like a small bird, not unattractive, but definitely bird-like, how long she’d known Harold and our mother. Heather said she’d been going out with Hal, as she called him, for about six months and that she’d visited mother with Harold about two weeks before. She said in her opinion mother was in such pain she couldn’t even feel it and that “the poor old dear” now needed a “gift only her children could give.” If she couldn’t feel the pain, I asked myself, then why does she need pain medications? Surely a Registered Nurse would know that and so I asked Heather, who rolled her eyes and clapped her hands together lightly without answering.

I have to say that the idea of putting mother out of her misery initially repulsed me, but I held my tongue out of respect for Harold, who, despite all the many problems in his life, had always been the good son, always there for our parents, especially my mother, at least when he was sober. Heather outlined what she called her “Two Cs” argument (compassion plus costs), i.e., how we do better by farm animals and our old dogs and cats than we do by our elderly, and how my mother was consuming vital services and driving up the cost of health care, not to mention causing all of us to divert money from our own needs. I thought both arguments had merit.

My sister June countered with her “moral argument,” pro and con, how on the one hand everyone has the right to a dignified death, but on the other hand nobody has the right to take another person’s life or cause another person’s death. Again, I could not disagree, either pro or con. Emote started crying and said we would all go to hell for what we were talking about doing, and what would the grandchildren think if they found out, not so much an argument, but a prosecution which, quite frankly, I had to reject because Emily didn’t even go to church back then, still doesn’t.

Dee Dee said she thought Charlie would have sided with Heather, and I certainly agreed with that, seeing as how the woman Charlie was having sex with when he died was about Heather’s age and size, not a bird-like person in voice or face, but a smallish woman with a bird-like body. At that point, Harold/Hal hadn’t said a thing, and I concluded that he was letting his decision to call the meeting in the first place speak for itself.

I thought Heather, being the professional in these things, carried the day. She’d been forceful, unemotional, convincingly clinical. Still and all, I found myself wondering how much we were being driven by Heather’s arguments, and how much, on the other hand, we were being influenced by the fact that none of us had much use for our mother. There she was consuming all this public and private money and family attention, when I think we all tacitly agreed she’d probably deserved to die a long time ago.

Despite her devotion to the church (she taught a Sunday school class for many years) none of us really liked our mother, not even Harold. She’d always been like a mother German Shepherd whenever one of us was under attack, but honestly, how can you like somebody who’s judgmental, vain, selfish, mulish, cantankerous, obnoxious, and, unlike the rest of us, including my father before he passed, a sanctimonious teetotaler? Growing up, we all thought we must have been adopted. My mother didn’t come to my high school graduation because her hair didn’t feel right. She wouldn’t attend Dee Dee’s wedding because she, Dee Dee, was already six months pregnant. She, my mother, treated June and Emily like they were children, even after they had their own children. My father died three days after my mother had him celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary, a formal, tedious repeat of something that probably never should have happened in the first place. As we debated whether to euthanize her, I listened to what everyone had to say, and ever being the decisive one, I closed off the discussion saying that if there was a time to die, it had probably long since come and gone for my mother.

I point out all these details so you will understand why we all pretty much agreed on killing our mother, even, in the end, bringing Emily around. However, time ran out on us before we could reach a consensus on who should actually do the euthanizing, as Heather continued calling it, and my sisters left the house arguing amongst themselves, which didn’t matter because neither of the three was a prospect for actually performing the task.

Harold, Heather and I continued the discussion on the back porch, sipping unsweetened iced tea and munching little sandwiches without crusts that Heather had prepared. Harold, as I recalled, smoked a chain of the little brown cigarettes he liked so much. He thought I should do it because I am the oldest. I thought he should do it because he’d always been the good son, and besides, he’d started dating this Heather person and called the meeting in the first place. Heather didn’t care, but thought one of the two of us should do it, being as how we were the men in the family.

Hal chuckled and said it was a shame Charlie wasn’t alive because he’d have taken the assignment in a heartbeat, seeing as how my mother once told him that prematurely grey hair like his was a sign he’d be impotent by the time he was sixty, a prediction he negated, of course, by having his fatal heart attack before ever reaching that age.

I said we shouldn’t ask any of our sisters to get involved, what with the kids, soccer and yoga taking so much time, and that we’d also probably never hear the end of what the funeral and burial would cost.

Harold said he would be willing to pay his share, but, as I recall, he was quite adamant about not killing our mother himself, which I would later come to regard as quite strange. I decided to euthanize the discussion, so to speak, and said I would consider doing it, and just for the record I stress I considered doing it. I said I would visit mother the next day and make up my mind, and if we decided to move ahead we’d take another day to pay our last respects, whatever each of us, meaning me, Harold and Heather, felt was due, even though she, my mother, would either be asleep, or sitting straight up in her bed watching television without understanding what was going on or hearing a thing we were saying.

Heather provided a small pill she said would “do the trick.” Would there be ramifications? Heather assured us no one in the nursing home would make a peep even if they suspected. She said that in the last hospice she worked in, the professionals had an ethic: three weeks in, the plug comes out.

The next morning, I drove myself to the nursing home. Mother looked every bit the corpse, propped up in bed with her eyes closed, barely breathing, her skin the color of twice-used dishwater. Even though I knew she couldn’t hear me, I sat by the bed and apologized at some length for neglecting her and my father, as well as for marrying twice, both times out of the faith, paying for three abortions, and for lying about my Beagle puppy getting caught in the car door after I accidentally stepped on her head. I told her how much I appreciated the two quarters and the card she still sent me every year on my birthday. She gave no response, so I went ahead and begged her forgiveness for watching her take an outside shower naked at the beach when I was seven. I was shocked when as soon as I finished my confessional, she opened up her eyes and started speaking clearly, and here I think I can quote her verbatim:

“Are you a judge?” she asked.

“No, I’m not a judge, I’m an insurance adjuster.”

“You looked so handsome with your silver hair, I thought you were a judge. You didn’t have to say all those things. After all, I’m not going anywhere. You know, they keep trying to put me in the box, but I keep jumping out. I remember your father singing about everybody wanting to go to heaven, but nobody wanting to die. Then he died and left me here on welfare.”

She began crying softly, sobbing, actually, so I explained she wasn’t on welfare, she was on Medicaid, which she’d paid for through withholding taxes down through the years, not correcting myself when I remembered I was actually talking about Medicare, which you get along with Social Security whether you're in a nursing home or not, and not Medicaid, which is indeed welfare, after a fashion. At any rate, she stopped crying, closed her eyes and went back to sleep.

For the first time since the meeting at the house, I began to reconsider my decision that her time had come. Obviously, she was still very much alive and she seemed more good and sweet than I could ever remember. What right did I have passing judgment on my mother’s right to live, or even on the life she’d lived? Regardless of her shortcomings, she was, after all, neither a cat nor a dog, and certainly not the uncommunicative person Heather and Harold and my sisters had described. I suddenly felt about two inches tall, consumed with guilt, which I’m sure showed in my face because my mother always said I managed to look guilty even when I wasn’t.

At that point, one of the nursing home workers brought my mother a pitcher of ice water. As the woman left the room, she, my mother woke up, leaned forward and whispered loudly, “What are all these fucking immigrants doing in here? And I don’t mean legal immigrants, I mean ILLEGAL immigrants.”

To say my mother’s outburst mortified me would be an understatement, me being a person who believes every person should be judged on the credibility of their accident report not on their immigration status or the color of their skin, or indeed the color of the skin or the status of the person who had been driving the other car. I told her I was going to leave if she continued talking ugly and cautioned her that most of the workers in the nursing home were immigrants or minorities. Once again, she spoke up.

“You’re not my good son, are you?”

“No, I am not your good son, that’s Harold. He’s your good son, your drunk son, and he’ll be along later this afternoon and he’ll listen patiently to your shit because he agrees with you.”

“Don’t talk ugly, son. The Lord will deal with you for talking ugly.”

“The Lord can kiss my ass.”

“Honestly, I don’t know where that comes from. Your father never cursed. The Bible says do not take the name of our Lord in vain.”

I responded by reminding her she’d taught me how to curse, inasmuch as my father never taught me anything because he’d rarely even spoken to me.

“He was very repressed," she said. You shouldn’t be repressed like your father.”

Just then another worker came into the room, deposited a lunch tray, sneered at my mother and left without even nodding at me.

“Where did all these fat butts come from?” my mother shouted out. “And I don’t mean big butts, I mean FAT butts.”

I told her that now she’d insulted everyone on the staff and that soon there wouldn't be anybody left who cared if she lived or died.

I was surprised at my own candor, but it went right by my mother, who’d gone back to sleep and was snoring loudly. I left her room confused about the course of action we’d discussed, although at that point I was once again leaning towards getting it over with.

Back at the house, I shared my experience with Heather and Harold, and called each of my sisters individually as a part of my commitment to this being a family decision. They were not at all pleased that I was reconsidering everything. Harold reminded me that not only was I the oldest, but the most decisive one, and, as I recall, he was quite angry by the time he and Heather left to pay their respects to mother.

I must have fallen asleep on the couch, what with all the stress and such, so I never heard them return, and could not testify as to the time. As I noted at the hearing, I did look at my watch, a very dependable Raymond Weil, when the call from the nursing home came at about three in the morning. The rest is all in the record — according to the charge nurse, our mother had been found dead just a few hours after she’d been visited first by my three sisters, who stayed only a couple of minutes, and then by my brother and Heather, apparently having choked to death on a sugarless Hershey bar and several large apple slices she’d failed to chew properly, which I thought at the time was maybe poetic justice in light of her stubbornness. However, the doctor who examined my mother (not Dr. Woodruff, who unfortunately was away on a golfing vacation in the Bahamas) told us the next day there was some question as to whether she’d died from aspirating the chocolate, or the apple slices, or both, or from heart failure caused by trying to dislodge one or the other, and he then said he was ordering an inquest.

What isn’t in the record is the shame I felt after Harold stood up shortly after the hearing began and confessed he’d killed our mother by sliding the chocolate and the apple slices down her throat while she slept. Had I gone ahead and used the pill provided by Heather, whom we never again heard from, there would have been no need for Harold to have taken things into his own hands. My sisters, I’m sure, felt the same, but we said nothing.

Our shame is now all the greater because Harold’s been in prison for eight years, this being his second application for parole. My sisters and I have tried to bear our share of the family burden by visiting him regularly, which, of course requires a considerable expenditure each year. It is not a big deal for me because I am now president of my own company, which produces non-removable in-the-wall DVD players for residents in nursing homes and incarcerated individuals in maximum security prisons, an idea, I must confess, that I brought away from my experience first with my mother and then with Harold. Be that as it may, I am happy to write this letter once again in support of my brother for whatever it may add to his appeal to the Board.

Yours very truly,

Ralph Hickey, Jr.

P.S. As to your suggestion that the Board might be willing to reopen the original hearing, or that one of us might be inclined to take over supervision of Harold if and when he is released, I think that would require another family meeting.