Kathleen A. Gagne

Kathie Gagne died 4,512 days ago.

September 19th, 2012 @ 1:13 pm

Remember back on September 6th when Cusack Mortuary told me that my mother was being cremated and I might have her ashes as early as the next day?
And then remember how I emailed Dr. Allen Cusack on the 11th and asked him for a status update and he said he’d let me know when I should receive the ashes?
And then on the 14th I sent another email asking for an update?
Then remember how I didn’t hear anything from him so I called on the 17th to see what was happening? (He said that my mother’s ashes were put in the mail to me over the weekend.)

At about one-fifteen on the afternoon of the 19th I received this email:

Good Afternoon

I need you to resend your sister’s address. The address I had was returned. Because we sent them together, the packages were returned. Please help with this and your mother’s cremains will be resent today

I replied immediately with my sister’s mailing address (which I had already sent him on the 4th).

Then I called Allen at 1:41 PM (Pacific) and we spoke for nine minutes. He told me that he had been dealing with some medical problems — which he acknowledged should be irrelevant to me — and was very sorry that his mortuary hadn’t managed to get my mother’s ashes in the mail to me yet. I said that I certainly hoped he was going to FedEx or overnight them, and he said he would. He promised that he would make sure it was done that afternoon and that he’d call and / or email me tomorrow (the 20th) with tracking numbers.

He also replied via email at 2:11 PM with:

Thank you. I will see to it your Mother arrives home as soon as possible.

I didn’t hear anything from Cusack Mortuary on the 20th. Or the 21st.

At 7:34 PM (10:34 PM on the East coast!) on the 22nd — what would have been my mother’s 64th birthday — I received the following email:

Mr. Gagne,

I am sending this for Allen Cusack who has taken ill again. He has asked me to apologize for him with hope that you would understand. He’s really overdoing it and we’ve had to make him sit down and relax. Your mother’s cremated remains will be to you on Monday as well as to your sister. Here are the tracking numbers.

California #[redacted]

Washington #[redacted]

Please accept our apologies and if you have any questions, he might be back in the office Monday if [name redacted] (his wife) allows him, but we’re all trying to help her keep him still.

Thank you,
[name redacted], Administrative Aide
Cusack Mortuaries

The tracking numbers I was given aren’t found at UPS.com, FedEx.com, or USPS.com.

Autopsy / Brain

September 18th, 2012 @ 11:56 am

In the middle of September I remembered how cold Dr. Caliendo sounded when he told me that there would be no way to tell what (if anything) was wrong with mom’s brain until she was dead and we performed an autopsy. So I sent this email to my attorney this morning:

Hey Steve,

This is sort of a difficult request, but I feel like I should make it.

On multiple occasions I was told by Dr. Caliendo that there would be no way to determine the extent or “version” of my mother’s “dementia”, if she did, in fact, suffer from dementia — or whether she had Alzheimer’s — without an autopsy.

I realize that it may potentially be too late to ask this, but can you please ask Dr. Wolf if she (a) analyzed my mother’s brain and (b) was able to determine anything about what may have been afflicting her memory and faculties?

I am asking you this because you said it is better if I do not communicate with Dr. Wolf directly.

Thank you in advance,

Note: I never received a response to this email, and the autopsy results did not indicate any abnormalities in my mother’s brain.

Les R. Koodoo

September 17th, 2012 @ 4:07 pm

At some point towards the end of March 2001, I purchased a coffee mug for my mom as a joke.

In late July of 2000, a friend of mine ¹ had written a blog post titled The Best Damn Kudu He Can Be. Here is the original post:

My favorite animal at the Zoo is the lesser kudu. You have to admire an animal with a name like that, laboring as he must in the shadow of the greater kudu. It must be like having an older brother who excelled at sports and academics in school, to whom you have always been compared and found lacking. A few months ago, I was visiting the Zoo at lunch with a friend and discovered the area where the lesser kudu is ordinarily found was empty.

I hope he made a break for it. I hope he made his way out into the world, free of expectations, shedding labels, determined only to be the best damn kudu he could be.

A short while later, after receiving tremendous kudos for his post on the kudu, he had coffee mugs printed with his blog’s logo and some sort of note about Les R. Koodoo or something like that. I can barely remember now. But I bought one for my mom and she loved it. She thought it was absolutely hysterical and she frequently thanked me for it.

I have no idea what happened to that mug. It might be in the storage locker my sister assembled for her. It might have disappeared. They don’t seem to be for sale any longer. But, damn, did we laugh about Les R. Koodoo.

¹ now deceased, sadly

Coming Home

September 17th, 2012 @ 1:59 pm

I called Allen at Cusack Mortuary today on my walk back to the office from lunch. He answered the phone himself and apologized for not replying to my emails. (He said they were having Internet connection problems in the office.) He asked how I was doing and I told him that I was still having a really hard time.

Allen told me that my mother’s ashes were put in the mail over the weekend. He said there was a delay because he had forgotten to give my sister’s mailing address to his father, and he apologized and took full responsibility for the delay. (Although he also mentioned that he was not feeling himself lately after the severe migraines and “near stroke” because of his “blood pressure problems” last week.) Allen promised that we’d have her remains by Thursday or Friday at the latest, and that tomorrow (Tuesday, September 18, 2012) he would find the tracking number(s) of the packages and would call or email me to let me know what they are.

He asked me if I had talked to Dr. Wolf, the pathologist and chief medical examiner of Lake County (according to him) who performed the autopsy on my mother. I told him I had not, and he told me that he had just worked with her again on an autopsy at another of his facilities. It was a brutal murder; a man was beaten to death from blows to the head, and Allen couldn’t understand why it was taking so long to return the cause of death, which he thought was fairly obvious. I said that it sounded horrible and he said that the worst part was that there were photos of the dead man’s bruises on the nightly news, and he felt that was a violation of the family’s privacy.

I told him — again — that it sounded horrible. He said it was, and then to change the subject I asked him to remember to call me tomorrow with the tracking number. He said he would.

Rxperts Pharmacy Bill

September 17th, 2012 @ 11:14 am

I sent the following email to attorney Steve Phillips of Pincus & Currier, LLP on September 17th, 2012. I attached a photocopy of the bill I received from Rxperts Pharmacy, which was postmarked September 13th, 2012.

Hey Steve,

I received a bill from Rxperts Pharmacy (attached) for $1320.28.

(1) It shows a line item entry for risperidone started on August 7th, which is the day I received a call from Woodland Terrace asking me to approve the administration of Risperdal. (I refused, but was ignored. See http://kathiegagne.com/2012/08/07/a-request-to-administer-risperdal/ )

(2) I don’t know if you want to send this to Dr. Wolf, but I thought I would send a copy as it lists several other medications.

(3) I have no idea why Rxperts Pharmacy is sending me this bill. At no point did I indicate to Woodland Terrace that I would ever personally be financially responsible for any of my mother’s bills; in fact I actually specifically refused to sign and / or return to Rosa Rivera the pages from the “admissions packet” related to billing. (See http://kathiegagne.com/2012/07/30/admission-pocket/ ) My question for you is: Should I respond to Rxperts Pharmacy at all? (A family friend told my sister to simply return any bills we are sent with “DECEASED” written on them.)

Thanks, Steve.

PS: We still have not received my mother’s ashes.

Steve replied to me via email eleven days later, on September 28th at 1:47 PM, with:

THX

Ken Kesey

September 17th, 2012 @ 12:01 am

[Today is] the birthday of Ken Kesey, born in La Junta, Colorado (1935). He was a champion wrestler in high school and voted most likely to succeed. He married his high school sweetheart and then accepted a fellowship in creative writing at Stanford. He got a job as a night aide at the VA hospital in Menlo Park, which is where he heard about an experiment in search of volunteers. It was part of the CIA‘s Project MK-ULTRA, which was investigating various mind control techniques; they were injecting people with psychoactive drugs like LSD and mescaline, and observing their reactions. Kesey signed up and was paid $75; in addition to the money, the experiment provided him with an idea for a novel. He combined the drug trips with his experience working as a hospital aide and wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962). It’s the story of a struggle between a powerful nurse named Miss Ratched and a con man named Randle Patrick McMurphy, who feigns insanity to get out of a jail sentence, and it’s considered Kesey’s masterpiece.
from The Writer’s Almanac

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest scared the living hell out of mom. One of her greatest fears was being institutionalized and losing her mind.

She was also terrified by The Birds, the 1963 Hitchcock film, though she somehow managed to avoid getting pecked to death.

It’s been five weeks since she died.

Update Request

September 14th, 2012 @ 2:41 pm

I just sent this email to Dr. Allen Cusack of Cusack Mortuary:

Hey Allen,

I’m just checking again on the status of my mother’s cremation.

On the 6th you said that she was being cremated and that we might receive her ashes as early as the 7th.

Then on the 11th you said you would ask your father for details and let me know.

Thank you for understanding,

Sister Carol Mary Morrison (Update)

September 14th, 2012 @ 4:10 am

A long-time friend of my mother’s sent me this email in regards to yesterday’s post about Sister Carol Mary Morrison:

Dear David,

Sister Carol Mary Morrison was one of 12 women, 4 being nuns, who lived at the House of Faith, part of St. Patrick’s parish in Providence. The actual house, the former convent, was on the corner of Smith St & State St, right across Smith St from the State Building. The church was next door, and the rectory behind. All, or at least the church and convent, were torn down years ago. The church, although not really very old, had walls that were built improperly so had to be condemned. Your mother and I were 2 of the 12 women who lived at the House of Faith in the early 1970’s. You probably know that we and your father were part of the Catholic Charismatic Movement and Christian Community which began in Rhode Island (the movement began at some Catholic university, I believe, then went on to Ann Arbor, MI, and so forth) with prayer meetings at the Holy Ghost Church on Federal Hill in Providence, and then moved to Smith Hill when Father Raymond Kelly got the pastorate at St. Pat’s.
[…]

Shortly after I posted this note to the website, my dad wrote to say:

Now a parking lot, was condemned as unsafe while your mother and I were on honeymoon. Our wedding was the last service performed there as pieces of the roof/ceiling came down into the church.

Sister Carol Mary Morrison

September 13th, 2012 @ 2:58 am

While I was going through my mom’s old Yahoo! email account I found several messages to someone named Carol Mary. She was clearly someone important to my mom, although the name only vaguely and barely rung a bell.

I sent an email to her on Sunday, September 9, 2012 at 11:57 pm. I wrote:

Hello, Carol Mary,

Is this a valid email address?

My name is David Gagne and I think you may have known my mother, Kathleen “Kathie” Albanese Gagne.

If you receive this, please reply.

Thank you sincerely,
David

The email bounced back repeatedly as unable to be delivered. The email address I found was cmmorrison@rinet36.org. Since I knew from the messages in mom’s “sent items” that her first name was Carol Mary, I took a guess that her last name was Morrison and I did a Google search for her.

I am pretty certain that the first result, an obituary for Sister Carol Mary Morrison of Providence, RI, is the friend my mom was writing. She died on July 16th of 2009.