I Obeyed My Mom's Deathbed Request. I Wish I Hadn't

I saw that I often settled for nice, when I could have been kind.

Connie decided it was time to die.

After eight years of thrice-weekly kidney dialysis, my mother had enough. The dialysis, along with a lifetime of cigarettes and vodka, dished her a deal-breaker: she could no longer live independently. She refused any further treatment.

Her decision left her as happy as I’d seen her in years. She orchestrated her final days from her hospital bed, directing my sister and me to bid goodbye to her friends, dispose of her possessions, and arrange for the interment of her ashes next to our father’s. He was the love of her life and since his death twenty-five years earlier, she’d been keen to join him. She didn’t fear dying. The only thing on her bucket list was the bucket itself. It was a curiously joyful time.

One afternoon, she handed me a list of all the nurses, technicians, and support staff at the dialysis center. She told me to go to the bank and get “crisp” $50 bills for the seventeen people listed, and to enclose one in a note card for each. She had drafted the note we were to include: “Connie thanks you for your care and kindness, and hopes you will use this to go out for a lovely dinner with someone special in your life.” It was 1991, that crisp fifty probably would have covered two steak dinners and a decent table wine.

Under the instructions and list of names was a line written in all caps: NOT JANET! I asked her what she meant and she told me that there was one nurse, Janet, to whom she did not want to give money or thanks. “She’s never nice to me, sometimes she deliberately hurts me. I don’t want her to get anything.”

“How does she hurt you?” I asked.

“She always jabs me with the needle,” Mom said, slamming one tight fist on the bedclothes. “The other nurses do it so carefully I barely feel it.”

I wanted to ask if she’d ever said anything, asked Janet to be gentler, or even talked to her supervisor, but I knew that wasn’t Mom’s way. Instead, I asked, “How will she feel when everyone else gets a note and fifty dollars?”

“I don’t care. I hope she knows exactly why she isn’t getting anything from me.”

Mom wrote a check for $850 and I exchanged it for seventeen crisp fifties at her bank.

Then I bought pretty, floral note cards and my sister and I spent the evening writing Mom’s note to the staff of the dialysis center. The next day, I drove to the center and asked the receptionist to distribute the cards. There was one for her in the stack. I hoped Janet wasn’t in that day, but I didn’t ask.

I wish I could have a do-over.

I would have gotten another fifty for Janet and given it to her with the same note. I wouldn’t have told Mom. Withholding the gift from Janet was small. It was petty. It was unkind. I can excuse myself by saying I was complying with my mother’s deathbed wish, and that I was dealing with the stress of her imminent loss. I was being a good daughter.

All those things are true, and maybe it’s also true that Janet was unkind to my mother. Still, I wish I had disregarded those factors and simply asked myself, “What’s the kindest action?”

This isn’t something I dwell on. It was years later, when it seemed to me the world was getting meaner and people were more distrustful, that I recalled the incident and recognized with regret that I had been an accomplice to unkindness. Was I getting meaner, too? I wondered. I saw that I often settled for nice, when I could have been kind. And I saw how often we all overlook opportunities to extend kindness, and take recourse in harsh words and thoughtless deeds. I wanted to do better.

Yes, I would choose differently today than I did all those years ago.

Nonetheless, you might ask: had I given the money and note to Janet, would I now regret having ignored my mother’s deathbed wish? Fair question. But no, I don’t think so. I wish I had erred on the side of kindness.

I will still occasionally fumble in kindness—whether sins of commission or of omission. But, if I am ever faced with similar choices, I will pause and ask, “What’s the kind response here?” and then allow kindness to point the way.

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