Father Clock is unrelenting when you are grieving, in a hurry, and looking for something small. Like a key. And you don’t know what it looks like. And the person that hid the key was shrewd, calculating, and a genius. And deeply mentally ill.
For three long days I spent hours at Pearl’s house, methodically moving from room to room. I didn’t allow myself to work ahead, either. No rambling through sentimental knickknacks. One room had to be complete before I’d start, or even look at, another. Everything stayed closed. I could only go backwards in rooms, not nose around and meander from room-to-room. I think this might be the first example of managing myself based on what I knew my limits to be. It wasn’t deliberate; rather, it was pure instinct. The idea of ambling through her house was too emotionally loaded and would have slowed me down. In the first three days, I diligently worked, languishing through the foyer, the entry room, two sizable hall closets, the living room, a small hallway bathroom, a laundry room, and an office/spare bedroom. The garage was a complete shitshow; I had to walk through it every day to get into the house, so I technically wasn’t peeking ahead and breaking my own rules. That would be the very last thing I went through. My rationale? If Pearl left it outside, it couldn’t be that important.
Logically, it also didn’t make sense to be bouncing back and forth when I had no idea what each room contained; doing so seemed a bit too much like a game of Marie Kondo ping pong. I knew myself too well, I’d start in one place and get caught up in another without any real idea of what I was doing. Drifting listlessly and crying. A lot. Unfortunately, this was not the time for grieving, I had a job to do. The front room with all of the unopened Amazon deliveries served as my organization staging center. Before long, it was packed with crap and I reluctantly began making trips to Goodwill every night on the way to get my son. Sometimes I’d go twice a day just to breathe fresh air. To be clear, I wasn’t emptying her home; my purpose was to get pertinent documents and valuables out. The rest would be sold. And I was doing this all alone; I’m not Super Woman.
On this day, I opted to start working in what turned out to be the master bathroom. There were two rooms left to tackle after this one: my mom’s bedroom and the kitchen. How did I know this? Because those were the only two rooms I hadn’t found yet.
Connected to the main bedroom and hallway, it was a respectably-sized, pass-through room. It had a full bathtub with sliding glass doors and a separate shower. Bizarre. Who needs to put walls around a tub to make it operate like a shower when there’s a perfectly good one 3 feet away? Another unsolved mystery buried with my mom. Anyway, Pearl loved those sliding glass doors on tubs, insisted on them in our Wonder Bread world, and I hated it. Mostly because Mick could see me showering through the bubbled glass and I wanted the privacy offered by opacity. A cool curtain with Bugs Bunny or something. There was a double sink, toilet, two closets, and room for a hamper and floor vase. One closet was so narrow I wondered about its utility.
Pearl had an eye for matchy matchy stuff. I was unsurprised to discover a toilet seat cover, bathmat, and contour rug that neatly hugged the front and both sides of the toilet. It matched the LazyBoy recliner. Bleh. That same godforsaken deep burgundy in the front room that looked more purple than red. I’ve never liked that color; use deep or bright hues of red or purple, it doesn’t matter. If you mix them, go get your vision checked. This is a post Industrial Revolution American home, not a bathhouse for King Henry VIII.
The texture of the set is what really made me cringe. Think 70s shag carpeting of different lengths and piles strategically placed to make a design in the rug. In this case it was floral. Not only was the design some mystery flower, the rug was in the shape of one of the blooms woven into it. Oh my God. Twice the atrocity in a 4 foot bathmat. The Pearl that always looked put together, at least in my eyes, had deliberately chosen the color and texture. How do I know this? Accents in the bathroom to compliment the atrocities that were her fixture coverings. Hand towels, a candle, potpourri dish, and a small framed prayer hanging over the toilet, all bearing the same color as the hellish shag floor flower. Ugh…her toilet coverings weren’t an accidental purchase and I would forever remember this as Pearl’s decorative preference in her last home. I need to remember this the next time I hit up Marshall’s; what will people think after I’ve left?
And then Jesus. So much Jesus. I’m Catholic and hold my faith very close to my heart, and it feels like sacrilege to comment at all on her expression of faith. To me, the ability to live according to one’s faith is essential to life. And, I find all faith practices fascinating and think we should co-exist, so long as your beliefs don’t infringe upon mine or vice versa. In my home growing up, agnostic, atheist, Jewish, Baptist … it didn’t matter who anyone was. My job as a Catholic was to love everyone, regardless. To open my heart and home. You do your thing, I do mine. I still live by this motto today. Happily ever after. Pearl was devoutly Catholic and very moderate in the expression of her faith. Most Catholics are, it’s part of our core belief system. You’d be hard pressed to find a proselytizing Catholic.
An increase in crosses in my younger years translated to an upcoming episode. 11 hung crosses in roughly 50 square feet of space indicated some level of permanence. It felt like overkill and indicated to me that she had slipped so much further than I had seen before. Mental turmoil messed with her head, but this was beyond comprehension. It was unsettling and it felt otherworldly in a dark way. Frankly, it gave me the heebie jeebies because it reminded me of events of my childhood.
I made it through the area under her sinks, and in typical Pearl fashion they were neat and organized with an “oh shit” bin. For the first time in days, I laughed my ass off. This receptacle was designed to mirror the junk drawer, ubiquitous in every household kitchen. There was an oh shit bin in every room. Why? Because there’s a place for everything and everything has a place. Only sometimes the best you could do was identify the proper room for placement, not an exact location. When in doubt about where something belonged, throw it in the room-appropriate oh shit bin. Her humor still gets me.
Her vanities were sparse; toothbrush, extra dental floss, Advil, Tums, and the like. It occurred to me that I had yet to stumble upon her medications, because there certainly had to be some. Especially given the cardiac condition that took her life. Nevertheless, I had yet to find any. They were likely in the kitchen next to a coffee pot or on a nightstand in her room. Who knows? I hadn’t been there yet.
The narrow closet in the bathroom would have been reason enough for me to not purchase the home. It was approximately 18” wide. Who can fold linens in perfect squares and especially fitted sheets? Well, Pearl could. Try as she did to help me learn, I still say, “fuck it” and throw all bedding in one pillow case, unfolded, and permanently wrinkled. Excellent momming on my part. Anyway, the inside of this closet was a picture of meticulous perfection. Towels, blankets, sheets, and washcloths, all neatly tucked and organized. Winter linens were accessible at eye-height, because they were appropriate for March weather, and out-of-season sundries at the top. On the floor was a small cleaning caddy with gloves, a few scrub brushes, and various chemicals for cleaning the area.
Also on the floor was an Avery 3 ring binder, like something you’d see in a CPA office. It was a gigantic one at 5 inches wide, had color coded tab dividers, and was full of paper, receipts, and other medical documents. Each tab was designated for a year, and each year had numerous pages logging the price, name, date of pickup, and expiry date of medications. A special section for notes and the prescribing provider was available on subsequent pages. The binder went back for at least 5 years. Um, okay?! Kind of a bizarre place to store what I thought were medical documents for tax purposes.
I mentally prepared myself for a quick clean of the final closet. It had a typical door on it, standard in size, and based on its placement along the walls and in the house, I guessed it to be about 4 feet in depth. If it was like every other closet in her home, there would be several ClosetMaid-style shelves that went from about 18 inches off the floor to the top of the closet.
I couldn’t have been more wrong.
Opening the door literally took my breath away and I had to sit. On the floor. Seems the stupid Henry VIII floral-rug-atrocity could serve a purpose and cushion my ass while I stared at the complexity and deepness of my mother’s mental illness square in the face.
On the inside of the door were literally hundreds of PostIt notes, each 3 x 3 in size. A rainbow of colors. Some had designs on them, others plain; Hello Kitty even made an appearance on my mothers door of distorted reality. Where the stick was starting to fail, Pearl had affixed a small translucent piece of tape across the top to hold her parchment secure.
The notes were placed with what can only be described as methodical chaos. Imagine how the wings look on a bird. Each feather, bearing its own distinct pattern and color blends seamlessly into the feathers directly above, below, and adjacent. The ones at the top lay over those beneath. Some feathers are shorter than others and some don’t really match at all when you look at them up close. It’s as if God had an oopsie daisy moment when that bird was on the assembly line. So long as the wings worked, He set it free to live its life. From a distance it looks like art. So, too, did Pearl’s lifesized medley of 3 x 3 papers.
On each note was my mother’s flawless script. Blue ink. My God,I’d kill for a handwritten note from her again. The top right corner had a date. Seems Pearl was leaving herself hidden affirmations of the psychologically distorted variety. There were quotes from scripture, drawings of the crucifix, and personal validations, all painful reminders of how ill my mom really was. Some notes were, “it will be ok, the devil cannot find you in the presence of God,” or “make the inside of your home the holiest of places, leave only when necessary.” “Fight the evil one at all costs,” and the most painful of them all, “Please watch over my babies and protect them with your guiding light.” I was one of those babies. In 22 years of not seeing me, my mom still wanted to free me from the burdens of otherworldly evils. It was endearing in a very twisted way.
In total, there were over 500 notes hung on the inside of that one door. I took each one down and organized them by date. They went back nearly 4 years. I read each one. I cried tears of heartbreak, anger, and loss. As the dates progressed, so, too, did Pearl’s belief that otherworldly evil was out to harm her and those she loved. Frequent mentions of red eyes following her. She was convinced, with every ounce of her being, that her doctors, neighbors, grocery store clerks, and even the mailman were agents of death and destruction. Harbingers of the devil’s dirty work. She trusted nobody. This is the kind of alone, lonely, and lost that the mentally stable will never know. Pearl endured it all by herself. It broke my heart.
As I looked in the closet I noticed several years’ worth of prescription bottles, tubes of ointments, and various boxes. And they weren’t empty. Not one pill was missing from any bottle. As I looked further, none of them had been opened. Not one. Some were still in their manufacturer’s packaging with the safety seal attached. All bore labeling from the pharmacy at the VA hospital or places that took her government benefits.
The closet was ordered perfectly. Cardiac medicines took up three shelves, prescriptions for edema on another. Statins kept separate. Drugs to help breathing had their own space. Dermatology and feminine health items also purposefully placed. Mental health pharmaceuticals took up as much space as all of other prescriptions combined.
Not only was the closet visually ordered to utter perfection, it was also systematized. Older prescriptions in the back, newer ones in the front. Arranged left to right by size; smaller containers on the right. Each prescription had a number on the top, which coincided precisely with a line and page in her binder. With a quick cross reference, I could tell who prescribed it, why, what the symptoms were necessitating the Rx in the first place, the date she picked it up, and the day it was cataloged. It was like the Dewey decimal system came in to organize the FDA.
It was fascinating, if I’m honest. The mind is a very powerful and complex machine. On the one hand Pearl’s brain was deeply broken and barely functioning; on the other, it was discursive, eidetic, and almost mechanistic. I’ve frequently heard that it’s not uncommon for the mentally ill to be extraordinarily smart. I guess it’s the balancing act that becomes untenable.
The medications went back for at least 5 years.
As I inventoried the drugs to the binder, not one was missing or out of order. Everything was there. The binder matched everything in the closet. She would have been an auditor’s dream.
The gut punch I didn’t expect was contained on the pages in the back. Each cross-referenced line detailed her rationale for not taking her medication. Her worldview was contorted beyond belief. She noted some doctors weren’t trustworthy, others had faked their medical degrees and licenses. Some had been possessed by demons and were trying to kill her, doing the devil’s handiwork while working for the US Government.
Regardless of her reasoning, the drugs were either poisonous or a means of granting “outsiders,” those human and of the spirit world, access to her brain and body. Once ingested, the medications would certainly make her lose control or let someone or something else take over. The degree to which her reality was warped went way beyond the night of Evil Waters all those years back. It had consumed her and, it seems, permanently altered her mind.
I wondered about the precise moment my Pearl left forever and she became consumed by paranoia, delusions, hallucinations, and terror. Did she know how far she had slipped? Or was the permanent residency a bittersweet destination, because life is easier when you’re not constantly fighting to get to “normal?”
Interestingly, my mom knew she was physically sick. Proof was written in her hand, but she refused any care to make her better. For years. The questions flooded my brain. If she had taken her heart meds, would she still be here? What about the antipsychotics and mood stabilizers, could they have helped? Why would she even go to the doctor with such paranoia?
The only explanation for why she went in for routine exams was because they were tied to her military disability benefits. I found out, on this day that my mother, who had separated from the military in 1969, had qualified for 100% mental health disability. Something happened to her before I was born, while she was in the military, that qualified her for total benefits.
This paradox forced an interesting question. If she trusted nobody, how on earth did the doctors convince her to go in for a catheterization? Certainly that would let the evil right in. She would be under general anesthesia and unconscious, unable to pray. It was her go-to defense mechanism. It is difficult to reconcile how she willingly admitted herself to the hospital yet she wouldn’t take any medication to prevent the need for a procedure in the first place.
I was completely confused…until I wasn’t.
She has also been logging all of her vital information along with symptoms of how she was feeling. Ritualistically. Blood pressure, pulse rate, and oxygenation were right there with basic CBC and other obscure blood results, too. That night I learned about things like troponin T, C-reactive protein, B-type natriuretic peptides, plasma ceramides, and a gauntlet of other test results run by cardiologists and pulmonologists. And with each test, her results got worse and worse, until the point it seemed she should have been dead. Only she wasn’t.
The tests revealed her heart had taken a beating. Years of smoking cigarettes and cooking with bacon fat and hand strained meat drippings. Real butter, whole cream, and the list goes on. Pearl loved cooking and was damn good at it. No shortcuts, no fake foods. Add all of this to the steady stream of cortisol dumping into her system, panic, and anxiety. Seems culinary delights and the atrocities of life don’t bode well for long term health. While I have my Google MD and frequently tell Alexa I am a Moctor, I am not into science…at all. Nevertheless, all of these numbers added up to a heart that was beyond repair and that Pearl was living on borrowed time.
And then it hit me. Pearl was a genius, and while she was no medical doctor, she was an exceptionally quick study. She didn’t need to know the biological reason behind each test result; the how and why didn’t matter. She only needed to know what the numbers meant. If X gets above a certain number, you should see a specialist. If X keeps climbing, you’ll need medications. If X exceeds a particular threshold, you might need surgery. At this point, you know your heart is failing. Surgical interventions would likely be futile and carry risks greater than any potential for successful outcomes.
Pearl knew exactly how sick she was and there would be a very easy way to finally end her suffering. It would require patience and planning. She had these traits in spades.
Her plan was only made possible because she had more natural intelligence than any doctor in her path and she was also terrified beyond comprehension. She had motive and means. Non-compliance with her treatment and medication protocols would aid in her departure. No matter how long it all took. She had a great game face and would have been an excellent poker player.
I think Pearl’s death was suicide by medical procedure. And while I have absolutely no proof, I am completely certain.
And it seems it took at least 5 years of planning.
