Who is your emergency contact?

A little question with a big answer.

I’d never had to follow an ambulance but my mom had to when she was a caregiver for my grandpa. Photo by camilo jimenez on Unsplash

For the majority of my life, my emergency contact has been my mom. She’s been my emergency contact for school field trips, job applications, excursions, and more. There was no question over who would be the emergency contact. Even when I moved out for university and moved states for a job, my emergency contact was still my mom. The only time I truly had to think about who my emergency contact was after she died.

Life went on even through the all-consuming grief and horror of her passing. I had to apply for my visa for my upcoming master's program and pack up all of my belongings from the house before my eventual move. I had a bunch of admin tasks to do, small and large. One of those tasks involved updating my driver's license. 

The DMV is notoriously a long process, one in which no one wants to deal with but has to be done. I'd made the appointment, brought my forms, and hoped for the best. However, the question that floored me wasn't anything to do with my driver's license. In fact, it was to do with my emergency contact. 

Who is your emergency contact? 

The question on the form seemed to move and shake on the form. I stared hard at the question, momentarily stopping myself as I filled out the forms. It was the first time i wasn't able to put my go-to person, my mom. I couldn't put her name down because she had died. Who as my emergency contact going to be? 

My dad lived in a different state and has advanced dementia. 

I don’t have a boyfriend or partner who could or would play this role.

I don’t have any adult children who would have this role, either.

It would seem a bit silly to have a friend who lived far away take on this task.

Thus, my sister.

Who are you going to call? Photo by Antoine Barrès on Unsplash

I've realized that figuring out my emergency contact was a game of mental gymnastics. It saddened me, knowing I had to confront this deeply personal yet unspoken part of life so soon after my mom had died.

My sister is married and probably has her husband as her emergency contact. Even my mom had her late partner or my sister listed as an emergency contact. Which I don't mind, really. My sister was older and was always the one who handled finances. 

The emergency contact question brought to the forefront the idea of: who is important in my life?  

I assumed my mom had that major role and responsibility in my life because she was my mom. It is humbling how I took that person, my mom, for granted in a way: obviously she's going to be the person I call if I'm ill. Of course she would take care of me when I was in high school and had walking pneumonia. She'd be happy to let me come to Florida for a visit and do a deep r&r whenever I needed a break from the intensity of working life in New York City. Yes, she'd let me move back into the house while I helped her with her hip-replacement surgery. It was just assumed that she would take care of me. 

But after her death, when I was figuring out my own emergency contact, and figuring out the reciprocal or unrequited emergency contacts, that I realized: I wasn't anybody's first choice of emergency contact. 

No one put me down as their number one choice. 

Maybe, as an adult, the lesson in my mom's death was: I had to be the one to take care of myself. Until I found the love of my life, I had to be that person for myself.

I had to be the one to be mindful of being alone. I had to truly think about who I would and what I would say if anything happened to me. Did I have people in my life who would drop everything and come to my aid if I were admitted to the hospital? Would my emergency contact, now and in the future, drop everything the way my mom did? 

I had no idea that the shrapnel of caregiving and death of my mom would be a deep interrogation into everything I had experienced and perhaps taken for granted in my life. Everything I had just assumed would be there. The emergency contact was a name and number you’d never think about using…until you had to actually use it.

I told the DMV attendant about my mom and how she had cancer and died and wasn't going to be my emergency contact anymore and I had to think up a new one. He replied saying someone (his uncle, maybe?) had cancer (and died?). In the mundane aspects of admin and life, there is connection. 

I just hadn't realized something I assumed would always be there would be gone.

Madeline Wahl is a recent graduate with an MLitt in Fantasy Literature from the University of Glasgow in Scotland. She is a writer, solo traveler, and millennial caregiver to her mom, who recently passed from terminal cancer. Her writing has appeared on Reader's Digest, HuffPost, Red Magazine, and McSweeney's, among others. She is working on her first novel in YA Fantasy and her first nonfiction book proposal on millennial caregiving.