My mother was born in Chicoutimi, Quebec, in 1935. She was strictly a francophone and spoke barely broken English. She and my father moved to Bulfinch Square in the mid-1980s. They were the last original owners of their residence at 511 Princess Street, Alexandria, Virginia. My mother worked in her husband’s office doing secretarial work. She had no formal education but for having graduated from a strict Catholic school in Quebec in the early 1950s.
She led an uneventful life, traveling between Bulfinch Square and her cottage in Quebec. My mother’s illness came brutally — a failure of the mitral valve that required urgent surgery. In 2015, she had open heart surgery and was plagued thereafter with persistent heart failure until she passed.
My father, who was an MD, had turned away from his classical practice in the early 2000s to become exclusively a practitioner of alternative medicine. His judgment was clearly impaired when he refused for my mother the life-saving operation on the grounds that the anesthesia would kill her. This was the start of a long battle to save my mother from a man who had lost any sense of rational thinking. He immediately interfered in her treatment, insisting that all cardiac medications were “rat poison” and that modern cardiologists “knew nothing.”
My mother’s co-dependency was on display at every turn. She was not above lying when it came to admitting she wasn’t taking her prescriptions. It was a hard battle to wage.
Summer 2019, Sitges, Spain, near Barcelona — my mother had a heart attack. We were both traveling together. She was urgently operated on at Hospital Del Mar, Barcelona. Medicated stents were placed inside the main artery. The operation was a great success. Within a few days we were back enjoying Spain.
Meanwhile, my father had contacted the hospital obsessively, claiming that as my mother’s legal guardian he had the right to deny that the operation take place. He also tried to have me arrested on the false claim that I was abusing my mother. Thankfully none of his pressure tactics worked on the Spanish system, which has zero tolerance for controlling husbands.
The surgeons at Hospital Del Mar were extremely clear: it was mandatory for her to take her medications exactly as prescribed, or she would be dead within 12 months. I knew what was coming. My father interfered, prevented my mother from taking her medications, and in January 2021 I received a phone call from INOVA Hospital — my mother had 6 months to live.
I then received a phone call from my father’s attorney, Foster S.B. Friedman. He told me that “my father owed me nothing” and that if I dared fly back to Alexandria to take care of my mother, I would be arrested, jailed, and slammed with a restraining order.
My mother was dying. I was going to save her. I knew why she was dying — and perhaps there was a chance she could survive if I registered her in palliative care. So despite the outrageous warning, I flew back during COVID, which was in itself an ordeal.
I registered at the Monaco Hotel on King Street, Alexandria, Virginia, as I feared my father and wanted to spend as little time as possible at Bulfinch Square. Within a month and a half I had been arrested twice on false charges, jailed, and received restraining orders that prevented me from even contacting my dying mother. This was all orchestrated with the help of two men — a drafting lawyer who had total control over my inheritance, and Dr. Scott Leaf, his associate. My father was too ill at that point to have carried out such a sweep even for the Machiavellian that he was.
Before I flew to Alexandria, I asked the City’s Adult Protective Services to assign my mother a guardian. APS did absolutely no research, did not contact any of her physicians, and simply asked her — in her home, while my father was present — if everything was “good,” because her daughter was insisting her father was killing her. Great job, APS.
I managed to register her with palliative care VITAS and, as expected, saved my mother’s life. She predeceased my father by two years.
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