Second Printing
April 10, 2010
From Winston-Higgins Press
Softcover ISBN 978-0-9826140-0-6
Hardcover ISBN 978-0-9826140-2-0
E-book ISBN 978-0-9826140-1-3
Gold Medal Independent Publisher (IPPY) Book Awards 2011
2nd Place Florida Writers Association Literary Award 2010 (Mainstream Fiction)
BOOK TRAILER
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D29xUkSahrg
SYNOPSIS
What if your mother’s last request was to let her go?
In the middle of a personal crisis and with two thousand miles between them, William Baldwin learns that his mother is ready to die, but no one is listening to her wishes for end-of-life care. Instead of taking a chance on life-sustaining treatment that can prolong her death but cannot cure her, Frances wants a natural and peaceful death. She asks William to convince the doctors, his father and his siblings to let nature take its course. Torn by her request, William, a med-school dropout, respects his mother’s dream of a good death but is not ready to let her go. Finding Frances is one man’s journey to honor his mother and to understand the larger cultural and ethical issues of death. In doing so, he is relieved of his past burdens and learns how to live.
Finding Frances tells the story of a woman who said “no” to the system that convinces us that life should be sustained at all costs. It’s a gentle, upbeat, and off-beat exploration of the love beneath a family’s defenses and contrary positions.
…There’s more to life than living and more to death than dying…
AUTHOR’S NOTE
William Baldwin’s struggle is the typical “coming-of-a-certain-age” conflict faced by maturing baby boomers. We are struggling with our own mortality while dealing with the care and reality of our aging parents. Fiction makes the topic accessible, and this book seems to help people open up to talk about it. Everyone seems to have their own experiences that need validation, or they have their own wishes concerning end-of-life care but don’t know how to start the conversation.
Finding Frances is based on true events that occurred during my mother’s decline and death. It is a story with a heart. And it just might change the way you think about the end of your life.
EXCERPT
1
Frances Baldwin was ready to die, but not like this. She’d always imagined dying in bed with proper notice so they would find her in the morning, arranged artfully on the pillows, bedclothes smoothed, and her eyebrows penciled in just right. She died in her sleep, they would say. So peaceful. It was a blessing she didn’t suffer too much.
A dignified death. Yes, that was the way she’d envisioned it. Not this terror that grasped her throat in the middle of the night, draining her mercilessly, bleeding her of oxygen heartbeat by heartbeat, leaving invisible pools of Frances all over the floor and the bed. The events of the past few hours were not part of the plan, and Frances was fast losing the ability to think clearly or to do anything about it.
Earlier she’d thought, my heart is going crazy, it’s running like a million little feet across a tin roof. Maybe this is how it starts. Maybe I am going to die now. The thought excited her and made her breath come up shorter than ever. I knew it. I knew it was coming. I’ve felt it for months now. She glanced heavenward, smiled, and made the sign of the cross on her head and shoulders. It’s as good a time as any. I’m ready, Lord.
She stumbled over to the long bureau, the one she and Bill had bought over fifty years ago when they’d first married. Try to be quiet, she told herself as her hand knocked the perfume bottle. She waited for a moment and listened, but there was no sound from the room next door. Good. He was still asleep. He would never approve of what she was doing. He’d have the ambulance here before she could say, “Go back to bed,” and she didn’t want to leave anything to chance. Not when she’d gotten this far.
She picked up her natural-bristle brush from the doily and fixed her hair. After smoothing the lines beneath her eyes with a dab of makeup, she got into bed and waited for the end to come.
It’s okay. No one will be surprised, she assured herself. Everyone knew she had the emphysema from smoking for so long. Smoking was a passion for Frances, so she’d accepted the diagnosis without regret; after all, everyone had to go sometime. She hadn’t even stopped smoking. She believed in letting nature take its course.
She’d accepted the gradual decline as easily as she did all the other indicators of her advancing age: when her thick brown hair faded to an unruly frizz, she’d tied it back in beautiful barrettes; when her joints stubbornly declined her demands, she’d stopped her ballroom dancing; and when her jowls softened she’d exercised them for a week before forgetting about them altogether. Like her poor digestion and sleeplessness, the heaviness and the fluid in her chest now seemed normal.
Frances lay still, waiting, trying to concentrate on something—the pattern on the sheets, the needlepoint flowerpot her daughter made the summer she had mono, the blue braided rug. Anything to keep her focused. Her eyes fell on the collection of family photos on the side table. William and Diane on their honeymoon. Sugar and the boys. Randy, so handsome in his suit. No, don’t look at them, she thought as she drank in their smiles and felt them begin to wash away the bittersweet taste of her determination. I can’t think about how much I love them. It’s so hard to leave them all as it is. Frannie’s heart now filled with a different kind of ache, this one impossible to bear. She wheezed in a long breath.
For as long as she could remember, Frances had been trying to separate from them all, gradually, so her leaving wouldn’t be a shock. But now that Frances could see exactly what her death was going to look like, even she was mourning the loss. She hadn’t expected that.
She’d tried to ready them for this night, this night when a little part of them would die and the rest of their lives would begin to grow into the little places she’d tried so hard to carve out as her own. Tears formed in the corners of her eyes as she imagined the significance of her life evaporate, but they disappeared quickly as she moved her concentration away from the photographs and back to the small pink bouquets on the wallpaper.
I hear you, God. I’m coming. She prayed the Our Father, then waited. She wasn’t quite sure what was supposed to happen next. The actual dying had taken Frances quite by surprise, like the interruption of an important news bulletin in the regular programming that had become her life.
She again imagined being found in the morning, looked around, and again tried to tidy her bed. It was a bigger effort to arrange the pillows artfully now that her breathing had become more labored and noisy. She could feel her heart beating in every capillary in her body, pounding through her skin. There wasn’t enough air, barely enough air, even though her heart was working harder and harder to get the oxygen she needed. Her chest began to hurt more than it ever had before; minutes went by as Frances waited for her heart to stop beating. Or explode. Or something.
It can’t go on much longer like this, she told herself as she waited for the next breath to be impossible to take. She waited. And waited. Waited for God.
An hour passed.
And her heart kept beating. Faster. Wildly, uncontrolled. It beat on and on and on. Still Frances waited, certain that it was her time. But what if it wasn’t?
When she felt the crushing weight on her ribcage, she began to panic. The pain increased until she could barely move from the mattress, as if a car had struck her and was now stopped on top of her chest, the doors opening and closing, the trunk space filling with suitcases and boxes, children bouncing up and down on the rear seats. Another hour went by.
This is worse than death, she told herself as the fear and panic began to overtake her determination. As the time went by, Frances began to believe that she was not going to die after all, but rather that she was condemned to live for years taking half-breaths and never having enough oxygen, unable to speak as the pain eclipsed her completely, alone and afraid her heart would beat ten million times more just beneath the skin until the only sound she could hear was the throb in her ears and throat. What could be worse?
I have to do something, she finally decided, I can’t stay here like this. I have to make it stop.
Frances rolled off her bed and stumbled into the kitchen for the breathing medicine. The inhaler had sat unopened on the shelf since she’d brought it home from the pharmacy almost a year ago, nearly forgotten next to the other medications the doctors had given her but that she’d never taken. She tried desperately to inhale the aerosol spray, but she couldn’t coordinate her movements. Fumbling in pain and fear, her whole body shuddered as the device fell from her hands. She leaned over to pick it up, but lowered herself clumsily to the floor instead; she had no energy to stand. Her arms were so heavy now, and she couldn’t move her legs at all.
“Bill, wake up, I need you.”
Her voice was weak. She knew Bill wouldn’t hear her. So she began to rattle things around in the kitchen, hoping to make enough noise to rouse him. She pulled the mixing bowls down from the shelf beside her, unable to take a breath deep enough to call him again.
Bill heard the noise and he called to her. “Frannie?”
“Call 911,” she replied hoarsely. Then she put her head down.
Frances Baldwin didn’t want to die like this, crumpled up in her old pink nightgown with the inhaler in her hand and her husband hovering over her as she looked up from the tiled floor. She closed her eyes and lost consciousness.
