The Call

In the second week of February this year, I got the call I had been expecting for more than a decade.

Except it wasn’t a call. It was a text.

Hi James. This is Judy Boyle. Not sure if you remember me, but I am a friend of your mother’s. She’s been admitted to Tucson Medical Center with severe pulmonary edema. She is having a lot of difficulty breathing.

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I stopped speaking to my mother in 2005. I was living in Los Angeles then with two roommates. For Mother’s Day 2005, one of my roommates had sent his mother a poem, written on some nice stationery. One had sent nothing but just called to talk to his mom on the day. I had sent my mother a big bouquet of flowers, after years of learning the hard way that anything less than a nice bouquet would enrage her. I didn’t make much money then and spent more than $75 dollars ($128 in 2026 adjusted for inflation) on the arrangement. The florists accidentally delivered the flowers to one of my mother’s neighbours, and so she did not receive them until later in the evening, when the neighbour brought the flowers to her. My mother, furious, called and screamed at me for several minutes. When I hung up the phone, I was in tears.

One of my roommates sat down with me, reminding me what he and my other roommate had done for their mothers, and how their mothers had reacted (they were delighted). He told me I was not being treated normally, and this should not be happening to me. I realised he was right, and started to draw the boundaries with Mom that would quickly lead to our estrangement.

Other than seeing her at two funerals, my mother and I had no contact until September 2023. A cousin of hers texted me, explaining my mother had suffered a heart attack and I should call her. After some internal debate, I decided I would reach out.

When we spoke in 2023, I tried to be as open-minded as possible about communicating with my mother. I said I would continue to talk to her so long as she treated me with a basic level of courtesy (no name calling, no hate speech). It was as if I was trying to catch up a very distant cousin on the last 20 years of my life: she had a general sense of who I was from the last time she saw me in my 20s, but no context for who I was as a middle-aged person. And my mother reacted with the same level of interest one might if you were forced to sit through the plot summary of a reality television show you had no interest in watching.

At some point, I expected her to say she was sorry she had not gotten to go to a milestone event in my life (my wedding to Basil, my MBA graduation) or at least say she had missed talking to me. But that never happened. In the past year, I have listened to episodes of the Recovery Elevator podcast where parents who were estranged from their children for even just a short time because of their drinking are beside themselves with grief. They talk about missing their kids, how much they regret the lost time when they were not speaking. While I wish these people had not suffered in this way, their decision to share these stories meant a lot to me, because it made me feel “normal” for wanting to hear something like that from my mother.

Communication in 2023 with Mom continued for six weeks. She could not respect the basic courtesy guidelines I had outlined, and so I stopped contact again. This cycle repeated once more in the spring of 2025, when she was admitted to a hospital in Riverside for a few weeks with COVID. The last time we spoke on the phone, she used my deadname at the end of the call. When I texted her after the call to explain I would not be tolerating the use of my deadname when she spoke to me, she let loose a flurry of texts so full of anger and transphobia that I can still feel the pain in my chest that I lit into me when I first read them.

The last words I wrote to my mother were a text, “I am sorry, Mom. I really wanted this to work out. But I deserve to be treated with respect. Good-bye.”

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My mother worked in healthcare for her entire career. She and my father had planned at some point to write a book on end-of-life planning: he was going to cover the legal angle, and she would provide content related to medical end-of-life decision-making (geriatric care had been her nursing focus). When I read Judy’s text, I assume my mother had a written directive somewhere that indicated who was to serve as her proxy in an event such as this. And I assumed that person wasn’t me.

A few hours later, however, the hospital called. My mother was unable to make her own medical decisions. She did not have such a proxy desginated in any record the hospital was aware of. (I would later call around to see if anyone Mom knew was aware of such a designation. It appears she never documented her wishes.) Would I be willing to make these decisions for her?

I said I would, working in cooperation with my brother. And so that is what we did. My mother’s health was in very poor condition before she was admitted to the hospital. She died on March 1, 2026, three weeks after her admission to the ER.

Judy, the family friend who texted me when my mother was admitted to TMC, is a practicing MD who knew my mother for more than fifty years and spoke with her regularly. She was able to provide insight as to what she thought my mother would have wanted. My brother, like me, had not been in contact with my mother for most of his adult life, and so shared the limited knowledge I had into my mother’s end of life preferences.

Sometimes I wonder if my mother didn’t document a proxy because she knew my brother and I would be called upon, and that we would do the right thing.

This remains a mystery, as does why she hated me so much.

I had an obituary published for Mom. When I wrote it, I tried to think of things that would be important to her, the accomplishments I knew she was proud of. But I did not pretend that being a mother was one of them.