I was awarded a federal grant to collect
evidence for an afterlife. I guess
that was the topic. The actual
title of the proposal that I wrote was Pre-Death
Intervention Experiences. The
head of the Psychology Division of the National Science Foundation personally
arranged it for me. He only asked
that I write an extensive report at the conclusion of the funding period, but
that I neither publish the data nor ever make a public presentation on it. We were both interested in getting the "experiments"
done, and it will all be just anecdotal - no proof of anything - but it was
good enough for me, and apparently him.
I loved my 90 year old, 85 pound, 4
foot 7 inch Aunt Florrie. As a
child, she was on the boat that brought our family from Nottingham to the
States. She was always sweet and
kind and supportive of everyone in our family. As her money ran out, we talked to a social worker who arranged
to have her stay in a state-supported facility, essentially an apartment. She was old but still sharp. She didn't need the typical care of
someone with dementia; she needed a roof over her head. It turned out that all 12 floors in
this building on the corner of 38th and Chestnut in Philadelphia were occupied
by those in similar situations. It
was a building full of poor elderly waiting to die. I couldn't bear to think of her stuck in this place alone,
and was quite surprised to learn that, if there were empty apartments,
"normal" people could petition to rent them. There was one empty apartment, right
next door to Aunt Florrie, and they were happy that I was eager to be near her,
to help her. I had no idea at the
time that I'd get so attached to so many others in the building, but it was for
me a labor of love. They all
needed just a little attention from someone, anyone, and they all had great
stories; it was an easy decision for me to move in.
I walked into her apartment one Saturday
morning so she could make me breakfast.
Yes, it was what she liked to do, and she made scrapple just like my
father used to, so it was a treat.
I was surprised that I didn't smell grease in the air when I
entered. Instead I found her
sitting in her chair, reading the Inquirer. I stood there and looked at her.
"It's supposed to be a hot one
today," she said.
"Another day above 90!"
I stared at her. I glanced over to her table next to her
chair where her glasses would sometimes sit. There they were.
"You're not wearing your
glasses," I said.
"Don't need them," she answered.
Now this is not the kind of
conversation she and I have had in a very long time. Usually I have to repeat, word by word, every sentence,
multiple times, to get her to hear me.
Not today.
"So what's going on?" I
asked her. "Your vision has
improved and it seems like you're hearing me better!"
She smiled. "I don't know, but I'm not going
to complain," she laughed.
"I guess you're here for breakfast. I just hate putting the paper down, I've missed it so."
And with a few bats of her
eyelashes, I ended up in the kitchen, making pancakes for her.
The next morning we found her dead
in her bed.
I don't know exactly what happened,
but if she was given a day of health before she died, I was just grateful. It was an interesting occurrence, a
medical oddity perhaps. I wondered
how many times such things happen. Does everyone get a healthy day at the end?
As I got to know the other people
on our floor, and on many others, I always shared with them the story of my
Aunt Florrie and this peculiar event, in the hopes that perhaps I'd get the
chance to see it happen again. It
very much is a right-place-at-the-right-time observation, if it ever happened
again at all, but I tried to talk to more and more of the folks in the
building. If they ever saw or experienced
something similar, perhaps they would share.
Bob, like most of the tenants, was
alone. His wife had died years
ago. He would often talk about his
mother, apparently a feisty woman, his three other brothers, and his sister -
his "baby sister". It
was the kind of family that seemed to always be squabbling rather than enjoying
the time they had together. One
day, Bob got into a phone conversation with his baby sister, who was living in
Delaware, about how he felt growing up in the projects, and how he knew that being
poor took a special toll on her.
She was surprised and asked him why he was talking about his feelings -
not a typical conversation for them at all. He replied, "well you are my little sister," and
from then on their relationship changed.
If he didn't call her every Sunday night at 7 PM, he'd get a call at 7
AM on Monday - always with the same salutation.
"What, did you forget about
your little sister?"
She kept him on his toes, and they
made up for many years on those Sunday nights. He was devastated when lung cancer took her so early.
I was in Bob's apartment, trying to
plane a little wood off the top of his bedroom door, which was constantly
sticking because of the heat and humidity. The phone rang and I heard him answer. I listened.
"Oh no I didn't. I never would . . . OK, that sounds
great. See you soon. I love you."
And that was it.
After demonstrating to his
satisfaction that his door could swing free I had to ask him why he was smiling
like a fox in a chicken coop (a favorite line of his). He said that his sister had called.
"What, did you forget about
your little sister?" she
asked.
He assured her that he did not.
Then she apparently said that she'd
see him soon, he said "great", and that was that.
"But Bob," I smiled, "your
sister has been dead for three years now."
"I know," he
replied. "Pretty amazing
phone call, eh?"
"Well why didn't you ask her
how this could be? Where she
was? Anything?"
"Well she said she'd see me
soon, so I guess I can ask her whatever I want then," he replied.
"Well if she appears to you
tonight standing by your bed or something, you'll tell me won't you?"
"You bet I will!" he agreed, looking forward to it.
Bob died later that day. The coroner estimated the TOD at 5:31 PM. He was found sitting on the sofa with
his phone in his lap.
More than a year of trying to keep
in contact with as many people as I could in the building had paid off. I realized that we can know very little
about a person's last hours and what may happen, especially relatively healthy
people such as my building mates.
How much don't we know about?
Since I was teaching Psychology at
a small college in New Jersey, I wrote a proposal to the NSF on my theory/interests,
and asked for one year's pay. This
would allow me to go on sabbatical, and spend more time with my peeps, and
hopefully get some more anecdotal information on the topic.
The Director didn't have the
proposal peer reviewed, which all proposals are. Often they are read by as many as a dozen experts in your
field, and comments collected.
Based on these comments, a decision is made on whether it is worthy of
funding. Instead, he read it
himself and told me he'd fund it.
He was more excited than I was!
I could now interact full time with as may of the folks here as
possible. The timing was bad and
my Department Chair wasn't very happy that, at the last minute, he'd have to
find a temporary replacement for me.
He was very frustrated that I would not provide a copy of the proposal
to him, but I gave him the budget pages, which is all he needed. I wasn't making any friends with this
one, but that was OK. Work was
work. The apartment was life. Work doesn't matter.
Mr. Davis was not much of a talker,
but he liked to have someone sit with him and listen to the radio, so this is
what we would occasionally do. We
were sitting, sorta listening, the windows were open and I could hear birds
chirping outside, wondering why that didn't bother him. Suddenly he let out a yelp, then
started laughing. "Michael!"
he said, "you're a character."
I had not detected the slightest
bit of Alzheimer's confusion in Mr. Davis, ever, but I explained to him that my
name wasn't Michael.
"I wasn't talking to you John,
" he cheerily snapped.
He slowly got up from his chair,
very slowly picked up his cane, very, very slowly walked around behind my
chair, and stood there.
I tried to be patient. I sat.
"Out of the blue" as he
would often say, he "flicked" my ear - you know, he held his index
finger back with his thumb, then let loose, flicking me!
"Ouch!" It was my turn to yelp.
"I'm just an amateur," he
replied. "Michael used
to always do that to me. Big
brothers are such a pain at times."
So, he had had his ear
flicked. There was no one else in
the room, and he assumed it was from his brother Michael. He seemed very pleased with it, not
scared or nervous. As he was
shuffling back to his chair he hit the floor hard. Heart attack.
The woman everyone just called Aunt
Helen smelled the lilac perfume that her mother used to wear about an hour
before she died. I happened to
have been there. I smelled it too. I couldn't tell you where it came from,
but it made her happy.
There's no intentional scrapple
theme to this report, but it is
Philadelphia! James Buchanan (no
relation) in apt 321 and I often shared a laugh over our very common
experience. We both used to look
forward to the weekend when our fathers would let our mothers sleep in, and
they would make breakfast. They
both would make scrapple, or sausage, or bacon, and eggs. The only difference was that Mr. Buchanan's
father used to make what he called pepper eggs, constantly putting pepper on
them as they cooked.
I wasn't planning on stopping by to
see James but I smelled food cooking so I knocked. He yelled, "Come in". This was pretty typical. Most tenants left their doors open so they didn't have to
get up; visitors let themselves in.
He was happily sitting at his little kitchen table, with a plate of
scrapple and pepper eggs half finished.
I smiled back. He even
offered some to me! He took his
coffee cup off its saucer and moved a little scrapple and a little egg onto it
for me. Just a little. He was clearly enjoying it.
I told him that I was pleased he
decided to cook! He had only used
the microwave since he arrived. He
assured me that he didn't.
"I smelled and heard the
scrapple cooking, so I came into the kitchen. There it was, on the range, in the pan, all done. All I had to do was turn off the range and
eat it," he explained to me.
It was a very common feeling that I
saw at this point - not one of amazement or surprise. He wasn't alarmed or astonished that food appeared cooked in
the kitchen. He knew who it was
from, and didn't leave a scrap on his plate.
I took a chance, went to my
apartment and called 911, requesting an ambulance. I wanted to catch him before he died. I wanted to know more. When they arrived, only 20 minutes
later, he didn't answer the door.
His breakfast and he were gone.
I would encourage tenants to
reminisce when I visited, to try to learn about the people in their lives who perhaps
loved them the most, or influenced them the most. Mrs. Alice Yokum, 86 years old, who insisted on going by her
lifetime nickname "Baby", was wheelchair bound, but mentally in
excellent shape. One evening, when
American Idol came on, I knew there was going to be nothing on that Baby would
want to watch, so I visited. Every
story of hers led back to her mother, who was a good and loving parent. Baby was an only child and her mother
worked hard to keep her content, always sad that she did not have a brother or
sister for Baby to play with. On
rainy summer afternoons they'd dress up, get some pots and pans and spoons, and
march around their house banging their "drums", having their own
little parades! If they were
within three months of Christmas and Baby was bored, her mother would cut out
snowflakes with her to keep her busy.
Talk about a lost art!
Folding up a piece of paper, cutting pieces off/out of it, then unfolding
it to see the snowflake you made.
When she told me the story, she surprised me by pulling out of the junk
drawer of her dining room bureau a piece of paper, brown around the edges,
which thankfully unfolded without crumbling. It was a snowflake her mother or she had made many years ago
- she still had one!
Baby was such a quiet person, I was
blessed to have her living over me.
I was actually surprised to hear something hit her floor. It was a metallic sound. Now people do drop things - I had just
never heard her drop anything before,
so I went up and see if she had a spoon that needed to be picked up or
something.
Her wheelchair was next to a simple
dining room chair, both seated before the living room coffee table. She was slumped over, scissors in her
lap, and half a dozen cut but as yet unopened snowflakes before her. In front of the empty chair, there were
several snowflakes, some still folded, some opened in all of their glory. They were really impressive. Baby never learned this intricate
style. Between the chair and the
table, a pair of scissors lay on the bare wooden floor.
We can never know if everyone gets
some sort of personal treat in their last day, if possible. I'm hoping we all do, but I'm not
someone who believes in fairy tales, or in the afterlife. Still, in my year spending as much time
with 130 people over the age of 70, I "witnessed" nine deaths, that
is I was there just before, and for each one, there was something good.
After my year was over, I filed a
pretty extensive narrative on my activities and how I spent my year with the
self-proclaimed "house of old farts" inhabitants. I was surprised to
be invited down to the NSF to make a presentation. Thirty-four scientists from the National Institutes of Health
were hand-picked as my audience, each because of their specific areas of specialization. Most I believe were psychologists or
medical doctors. The Director who
invited me encouraged me to just come prepared to tell some stories of the
people I knew. He would even have
a nice overstuffed chair for me on the stage, so I could just relax and talk to
the audience. I asked for a pipe
and a blanket for my lap, and he smiled as he told me that it wasn't in my
budget. The question and answer
period lasted an hour and a half, following my 50-minute talk. The response was very warm, although
they asked me to, for now, keep my observations to myself. It was nice that they trusted me and I
was prepared to keep my word as well.
I did, however, find it all very peculiar. It felt like I was not exactly trail blazing with my
work. They had other data. I had no idea what it was.
When I returned from my visit to
D.C. (actually, my talk was held in Bethesda), there was a letter awaiting me
from the Director. I learned that
I had been awarded, without even submitting a proposal, a second year of
funding. My salary plus 10%, for a
third year, was also provided, with some wording suggesting that additional
support would be provided for as long as funds remain available to the
agency.
I turned 60 this week. This is not the career I was planning
on, but one I'm happy to pursue. My
Chair was shocked when I submitted a request for a year of absence, right after
my sabbatical. I don't know what
he'll do when I request additional time off.
While my immersion into the lives
of these senior citizens has been great, and the occasional surprises continue
to be shocking to me, I occasionally think about another question. When my time comes, what will my surprise
be? To be honest, I can't wait see! I wonder if I'll even get time to write
it down. I just hope it somehow
involves scrapple.
©
2012 John Allison
