KC nursing home never told patient’s son she died of COVID. Her death certificate did
For all but three days of the 12 years that Audrey Bullock had lived at the Redwood of Blue River, which sounds a lot lovelier than inspectors have found it to be, her son Tim Bullock visited her there, feeding and changing her himself. He brought her clean laundry and music he’d recorded for her. Most days, he went twice.
“Maybe that sounds odd,” says 62-year-old Bullock, a retired Kansas City mail carrier. Duty and care on that level for an elderly parent with Alzheimer’s have become a rarity, it’s true. But if his devotion makes him a flat-out oddity now, it’s the rest of us who should be embarrassed.
Of course, those visits ended with COVID-19, and after many in the long-term care facility in Kansas City became infected, even what Bullock calls the “at-the-window thing” was no longer possible because patients had to stay in their rooms 24/7. So those who had family could no longer even wave at them from the downstairs sunroom.
For both Bullocks, this was agonizing. “I’ve been praying she wouldn’t realize I haven’t been there, but I got to speak with one of the aides in her hall, and he told me she knows I haven’t been coming but can’t understand why,” Tim said in his first letter to me about the situation, back in March, in response to one of my earliest pieces on the coronavirus.
We started corresponding after that, not because I thought I’d write about him, but just human to human, because his constancy was so moving that I asked him to keep me posted and he did.
“When I ate with her,” he wrote in another March letter, “I always brought mashed sweet potatoes that I put brown sugar & cinnamon on as she always likes them. The food at the nursing home isn’t very good at all. … They give her mashed potatoes both lunch & dinner, EVERY SINGLE DAY.”
Mother his responsibility after father died young
Bullock was just starting out at the U.S. Postal Service when his dad died at 62 in 1980. The son realized right away that his mother would be his responsibility from then on, he said in an interview this week, because his father “hadn’t left us much, and my mom was from that generation where the husband takes care of everything. I’m going to be honest, there were times when I resented not being able to do things” because of that obligation.
Obviously, Bullock was also extremely close to his mother, and so relieved to at least get to spend a couple of hours with her as she was dying. Prayers answered, he wrote me. But since her Aug. 21 death, at age 96, what he’s learned about her final months continues to nag him. And ought to bother all of us.
He thinks about how the facility kept moving her back and forth between the COVID-negative and COVID-positive halls, which must have been intensely disorienting. And ineffective, as the place was also taking in new COVID-positive patients. These were patients who had been released from hospitals and had been barred from returning to their own nursing homes while they were still sick.
No wonder The Star reported that as of Aug. 10, 19 deaths, one-fourth of all COVID-19 fatalities in Kansas City, had been in that one long-term care facility, which advertises that it has 132 residents. A spokeswoman for the company, Holly Anderson, would not say how many COVID-related deaths there have been at Blue River since then: “Currently, not required to post deaths on the website,” she said in an email. There have been 99 new COVID-19 cases at Blue River since August, the last of those reported on Nov. 10, according to a spokeswoman for the city health department.
When the home finally did allow Bullock to visit, during his mother’s final hours, he saw that they hadn’t bothered to move a single one of her personal belongings into her bare new room. She’d been a birdwatcher, along with her son, and would have been so comforted by the little photos of birds from a calendar that he’d cut out and hung on her walls; was it too much to ask that her caretakers at least try to make her comfortable in a different room? Even the photo of mother and son together that would surely have been a balm was nowhere to be found.
She was in the COVID-negative unit when she died, and it was her son’s understanding that even when she’d earlier tested positive, it had probably been a false positive.
But then, when he got the death certificate, it said that she had died from complications of the coronavirus. Under “underlying cause” it says, “complications due to end stage dementia — years” and “COVID-19 — 6-8 weeks.”
What? Yet they didn’t tell him that when he came to her death bed? Or tell him at any point that she’d had COVID-19 for six to eight weeks? What else hadn’t they bothered to tell him? Anderson, the spokeswoman for the company, said someone would be in touch with Bullock to answer his questions.
‘I don’t know what to believe’
Redwood of Blue River changed hands five times in the dozen years his mom was there, Bullock said, and the care went from OK to really not OK. After his mother died, the current administrators of the facility where Bullock had spent so much of his life, too, never even sent him a note of condolence.
“I don’t know what to believe,” about her cause of death, Bullock said.
I believe a few things:
▪ Tim Bullock, you are a good, good man.
▪ How good to be odd, in a society that treats our elders, particularly those without means, like they aren’t even people.
▪ Our criminal indifference to the old and the sick and the indigent has made this pandemic so much worse than it ever had to be.
▪ Audrey Bullock, born in Kansas City, Kansas, on August 29, 1923, was loved and gave back and did matter in this world. A child of the Depression, she remembered being happy to get an orange for Christmas. She raised two sons, loved her family and walks with her Westie, Zach, who died in 2005. Listening to her favorite singers, Nat King Cole and Tony Bennett, brought her great joy.
“What she most enjoyed was doing things for others,” Tim wrote in her obituary. “In her later years, she did volunteer work at St. Joseph Hospital, putting in nearly 800 hours, right up until when she had to enter the long-term care facility. Even there, when she saw another resident struggling in their wheelchair to get to their room, she would help push the chair for them until it got to the point where she was no longer strong enough to do so.”
Tim reminds me of my own father, John Henneberger, who visited his sister Ginny every single day she was in the nursing home with Alzheimer’s. He sang to her and read to her, from the newspaper and the Bible. And like Bullock, he came to know most of the other residents in the facility. Dad would take turns bringing each one his or her favorite treat and would make the rounds greeting them every day, telling jokes that weren’t new but never got old.
Once, in my 20s, when I was with him visiting Gin and wondering whether we really had to spend time with every single person in the whole place, he reminded me sternly that, “This will be the only moment of levity that some of these folks will have today.”
Much later, when he got the gentle old age that he deserved, before slipping away at 93 three years ago, I liked to think that it was in recompense for those daily visits. And though life doesn’t always work that way, I wish that sweetness at the end for Audrey’s faithful son, too.
This story was originally published December 11, 2020 at 5:00 AM.
