So Your No-Contact Parent is Dying

One morning twenty years ago, my mother and I were sipping coffee and watching ER like usual. She had the day off from selling ornaments, frames, and commemorative gifts at the mall. I was sixteen, at home “sick” once again before dropping out of high school altogether. The show was syndicated by then and aired around ten or eleven AM. My mother loved George Clooney. I loved Juliana Margulies’ curly hair. In this episode, special guest star Ray Liotta played a dying patient and estranged, alcoholic parent. 

ER didn’t pull any punches. Liotta’s character came in belligerent and bellyaching, literally, and by the end of the episode, he’s dead. In his arc, his medical team tries connecting him to his distant son with increasing urgency as his condition deteriorates. Unsurprisingly, the son isn’t interested in granting dear old dad absolution. The man dies unclaimed, and unforgiven. 

“This one’s one of my favorites,” my mother said of the episode. I liked it too, until I found myself living it. 

My mom is not an alcoholic. That would be my dad. She’s something worse: neglectful. Her kids, her ambition, her mental and physical health. This isn’t a criticism. It’s hard to hold an opinion of a fact, although I certainly managed. My wounded psyche only recently began to view her not as a failed superhuman, but similarly wounded and scared of change.

I did not consult forgiveness, which contrary to popular belief, you don’t need to understand one’s motivations or lack thereof. It took years of reconnecting cause and effect to uncover which needs went unmet, where Pentecostalism stood in for reason. The subsequent image wasn’t that of a monster, but an ordinary person with no credo, only the instinct to self-preserve. 

Ray Liotta’s character on ER, Charlie Metcalf, appeared only once: in season 11, episode 6, titled “Time of Death.” The 44-minute real-time episode forgoes the show’s iconic opening theme and non-diegetic music for a realistic story stripped of melodrama. Liotta won an Emmy award for it.

Before Charlie takes a turn for the worse, Nurse Samantha Taggart (Linda Cardellini) gets ahold of his son Bobby. Charlie is intubated here and consequently cannot speak. Nurse Taggart says his dad’s outlook isn’t good. He asks to be put on speaker. Charlie has not heard his son’s voice for years. Bobby admits he doesn’t know what to say. He takes a breath and thinks. “Hey Dad—nice knowin’ ya.” The click and ensuing dial tone stuns the operating room while Charlie’s bloodshot eyes fill with tears.

My mom pointed at the TV and said, “That’ll be you with your dad. You just watch.” Like she was betting on it.

The Alcoholic Parent trope is a sleek vehicle for tragic stories of childhood neglect. Indeed, Charlie’s choices indirectly caused his wife’s death. The issue seems obvious; “If only he just stopped drinking.” If only my dad stopped drinking, we wouldn’t be so broken.

At least, that’s the story I heard. My mom and dad were drug dealers. She won custody of her kids in exchange for naming our father the mastermind. In her eyes, she wasn’t only a good mom, she walked free because of it. Our dad was a felon, abusive, worthy of as much disdain as she was praise. “Time of Death” represented her ideal conclusion to his parenthood. It dubbed her the winner. 

Charlie crashes mid-procedure seconds after his only child bids him the crudest farewell. This is where the episode gets artistic, intercutting people and noises from his immediate surroundings with his perimortem hallucinations. One moment, his young son is running through a desert with a fishing pole over his shoulder. Next, he’s approaching his late wife on the dock of a reedy lake. She invites him into the water.

Then his doctors revive him, and the brilliant sun overhead reverts to a surgical lamp. Before his drinking took over, Charlie was an artist. He painted a mural for his wife’s church. “But it can all switch on ya,” he warns. “It can all switch on a dime.” He didn’t start drinking until his choice to stay home one day got his wife killed in a car crash. 

Charlie’s alcoholism alienated his son. My mother alienated me by calling all faggots disgusting. I knew I was gay when I was nine years old, crushing on my neighbor Jordan. My mom probably knew before I did yet refused to accept it, even after I was out of the closet. Something else she and Charlie did is neglect themselves. Charlie doesn’t come into the ER until his symptoms have him at the brink of consciousness.

Likewise, my mother let a kidney infection advance until both organs died in her body. Doctors have brought her out of septic shock at least twice, both times the direct consequence of her ignoring symptoms. She relies on a dialysis machine to stay alive. Twenty years after watching “Time of Death,” it’s not my father dying in the hospital—it’s her. 

Realizing death is imminent, Charlie asks Nurse Taggart to try calling Bobby one more time. His roommate answers instead and tells her Bobby went to class. That’s the last Charlie hears from him. His son goes back to his life at school, a track that faces one firmly forward.

By 2018, I was set to graduate when my appendix got inflamed and required emergency surgery. The night I got discharged, I called my mom with an ultimatum. You don’t get to choose which parts of me you love. It’s all or nothing. She chose nothing. Last year, when her illness freely took hold, my niece called asking if I might talk to her. I declined. I said my goodbyes eight years ago. This is just the past catching up with itself. 

That is how a no-contact situation ends: badly, without absolution. It is the lesson written into ER’s “Time of Death,” one my mother thought my father deserved. Today he is relatively healthy; three heart attacks and a triple bypass later, he stopped drinking and smoking. He also stopped hiding from his abusive past and openly admitted his mistakes. My dad is far from perfect, but at least he didn’t stop growing up. He’s the most redneck guy you could imagine and he doesn't care that his son is gay.

My mom on the other hand calls Black people she doesn’t like the n-word. Dad may well outlive her. Bigotry is the only offense of hers I can write about tastefully, and the only one I can claim independently. I have two older siblings. 

To remember her best is to cut mixed memories down their sore, ambivalent middles and splice only nice parts together. Cut scenes litter my brain’s editing room floor, like the one where Charlie tells Dr. Luka Kovač (Goran Višnjić) what to do with his body (ER wiki). But who does it serve, all that splicing and sanitizing of history? Not me, my siblings, my nieces—her granddaughters—no one except my mother. Beyond a certain age, the ugly truth isn’t scary, it’s liberating. My mother is not on my side, but I am. So are other loved ones. Good memories aren’t lies, but remembered alone, they’re just half-truths. Tricks of nostalgia. An asterisk still glimmers in her eye, because even her best has something to hide.