A semi-rural phone call

I called a local healthcare group yesterday to report that my mom had died. I thought that her “chart,” which became inactive after she entered a nursing home, should be marked as closed.

The call could have taken a minute or two. Instead, I ended up talking for maybe ten minutes with the person who looked up my mom’s info: about the drive to New Jersey and back, about my mom’s five years of never catching COVID, about her moments of terminal lucidity, about her dying peacefully while asleep. I finally had to be the one to end the conversation. “I should let you go so that you can get to other people,“ I said. And the person on the other end expressed, again, her condolences.

That kind of leisureliness is something I appreciate about the semi-rural way of life.