The Painful Truth About My Father's Death

I lost my mother in May 2005 and my dad nine months later. It's a sordid tale of woe for both of them, but for my dad in particular.

Dad was living in an assisted living facility. Long story short, I had had a couple of run-ins with the women who distributed his meds and spoke only Spanish. I delivered potassium on a regular schedule and they kept running out of it. I would go to each girl and point to my dad and point to potassium, hold up one finger and say, "One pill per day." I did not know you could kill somebody with potassium, but I do now.

He became extremely disoriented. He was rushed to the VA Hospital in Tampa. His system was "awash in potassium" - their words - and he was in renal failure. My dad needed immediate dialysis. His living will had very specific requests, and dialysis was specifically addressed as a "no." Even so, I had to be the one to make that final call. It still haunts me and I wonder if I'll ever get over it.

The day after he died, I was driving over to Pinellas County to deliver his burial clothes to the funeral home. My cell phone rang. It was a hospice doctor. He was foreign. I could barely understand him. He was asking me why my father died because he hadn't had the chance to meet him. I said, "Renal failure." That's all I'd ever been told. The doctor said, "No, ma'am. I can't put that on a death certificate. The state of Florida won't let me. There must be another primary cause. Renal failure would be secondary. Who was his doctor?" I said, "Well his doctor who knew him didn't go to hospitals. And different people came in every time. I wasn't provided with any one name."

I said, "You know what? If you don't put renal failure, then put anything you want." ..."

Then the light came on. I said, "No wait. On second thought, put this: He died because the women taking care of him in the ALF tripled his potassium and threw him into renal failure because they didn't know the first word of English, couldn't read the instructions for his meds, didn't know the difference between uno and tres - and they killed him. How about that? Is that primary enough?"

When the death certificate came through, it said, "Renal failure." So what was that conversation with the doctor all about? I'll never know.