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The good listener

High school student Jessica Flammer helps hospice patients make videos documenting their lives. In the process, she has learned about her own.

By KELLEY BENHAM
Published March 27, 2005

[Times photos: Scott Keeler]

Jessica Flammer talks to hospice patient Bill Roberts, 71, of Clearwater. Her questions make him remember things he’d forgotten.

	Hospice volunteer Jessica Flammer, a junior at Palm Harbor University High School, has interviewed more than 20 hospice patients.

CLEARWATER - He's 71, and he's dying. Heart trouble.

She's 16, and no one close to her has ever died.

She has sat in dozens of living rooms like this, with the pills on the table and the walker in the corner, talking to people about things they thought they'd forgotten.

Jessica Flammer volunteers for a hospice, helping dying people make videos for the people they will leave behind - sons and daughters, great-grandkids they haven't yet met. She's in and out of their lives in a couple of hours, back to SAT prep and band practice. Sometimes she is one of the last people they really, really talk to.

"Should I call you Bill or William?" she asks, talking loudly.

"William was my father," he says. Bill then.

"Are you ready?"

In the final product, she's just the quiet girl on the edge of the frame, barely relevant. It's not a conversation. It's not about her.

But of the two of them, she's the one who takes something new with her when she walks out the door.

Last week, Jessica interviewed Bill Roberts about his life. A few days later, we interviewed Jessica about hers.

Jessica: What do you remember about your childhood?

Bill Roberts: My mother and father divorced when I was 2 years old. . . . My mother was quite a vindictive woman, and my dad never found me again until high school. It wasn't that pleasant.

Jessica's in her native habitat, the Starbucks on U.S. 19 in Palm Harbor. She knows just about all of the other kids here. They've just been released from Palm Harbor University High, where she's a junior in the International Baccalaureate program.

She's drinking an iced caramel macchiato and eating something chocolatey and peanut buttery. She's thinking back about Bill Roberts. She remembers just about everything he said. She remembers just about everything that everybody says.

"When he was saying he had this bad mom, I was like, "Noooo, uh-uh,' " she says. "I couldn't deal with that."

She knows lots of people from divorced families, but her family still eats dinner together almost every night. Her grandparents have been married 51 years, and her parents still adore each other, as far as she can tell. Her dad owns a car dealership in Spring Hill. Yes, they're those Flammers. Her mom is a "domestic engineer."

"That's what she calls it," Jessica says. "Right now she's at hospice making 400 invitations. She's president of the band boosters. I'm in marching band, concert band and jazz band. She's vice president of the IB board at school.

"She knows everything going on in my life. She listens really well. I could talk about the most boring thing for hours."

A guy at the next table hears all this and shouts at her: "She's so cool!"

Jessica nods. "Harry knows my mom. My friends love my parents."

Roberts: Mother was a short woman. I don't know if she was 5 feet tall. I put her on top of the refrigerator and left her there.

Jessica: What did she do?

Roberts: She sat there. She couldn't get down. My stepfather let her down when he got home.

Jessica's mom, Tammie Flammer, is 5-foot-8, so Jessica has never put her on top of the refrigerator. Come to think of it, she has never done anything really rotten to her mother, not that she can remember or will publicly admit.

Anything?

She's thinking.

Tap, tap, tap.

"I used to . . . okay . . . I was a tomboy and everyone had Easy Bake Ovens and I had a creepy crawler maker and I'd make the bugs and I'd make them very real, because I was very detail-oriented - I'm a perfectionist that way - and I'd put them inside the washing machine.

"I would sit in my room when I knew she was about to do laundry, and I'd just wait for the scream."

Jessica notes that her mother gets nervous when she gives interviews.

Roberts: Hunting and fishing. That was my thing. I can't do it now, but I used to be able to run up and down those mountains in snowshoes, chasing bobcats.

Jessica, born in Palm Harbor, has never hunted bobcats. But she has interviewed more than 20 hospice patients and is therefore hard to surprise.

"One guy told me he had sex with Judy Garland," she says. "I'm like, "Okay, cool.' One guy sang to me. He performed for the queen of England.

"One woman, she's 86 and came out in a conga line with her walker. First video I ever did. I was nervous. I was doing the camera and I was losing my mind. I'm like, "Are they going to keel over? I don't know CPR and I'm going to scream.'

"What I feared the most was this woman hating me for being 15. Telling me how stupid my generation is. Well, she came out with her brother and nephew in a conga line. Da-da-da-da-da-DA! Kick! That's hilarious. Can you picture these people?"

Her cell phone rings.

"Hey, Bri. . . . I'm with Kelley, the St. Pete Times chick. Still. Yeah. I'm doing the interview."

Brian's a hospice volunteer too. About 20 teens participate in the Lifetime Legacies program at the Hospice of the Florida Suncoast, most earning credit they need for school. Jessica finished her required duty some time ago but kept going. She did another interview yesterday. That guy rode to Philadelphia on a freight train at 15.

Anyway, Jessica says, after the lady did the conga in her muumuu, she was never nervous again.

Usually, when she gets home from taping an interview, her dad asks her, "Did he look like he was about to go?"

Most dying people, she says, look like the rest of the old people out driving around.

"It's not just people hooked up to tubes, wired like Christmas trees," she says. "It's people with stories, really fascinating people."

Bill Roberts, for the record, looked totally spry.

Jessica: You've been married 50 years. How'd you meet your wife?

Roberts: At a dance. Her best friend was one of the best dancers I've ever met. . . . Strange you bring it up, things I'd forgotten for years.

When Jessica's parents met, her mom was engaged to somebody else. She knows this because, after asking so many questions of strangers, she started asking them of people she knew.

When she did an interview, she noticed how relatives in the room would say, "Really?" And it occurred to her that we can spend so much time with people without really knowing them.

So now she knows that her grandparents met in middle school. That she comes from the pioneering McMullen family. That her grandfather used his life savings to buy a car dealership in Tarpon Springs.

That her mom fell for her dad as soon as she saw him, and her grandfather liked him too. "My grandfather was really protective. He'd look at your shoes and if you didn't have good shoes, you were done.

"My dad had good shoes, apparently."

Roberts: I had a little free time, so I ran for state legislature. I served in the New Hampshire House of Representatives 10 years. . . .

Roberts: . . . We passed a lot of good education bills, and I mean good ones.

Jessica: We could use you.

Although she is too young to vote, Jessica considers herself a Republican.

She thinks Dick Cheney is "the greatest politician since Bismarck."

(We looked it up: Otto Eduard Leopold von Bismarck, a.k.a. "The Iron Chancellor," engineered the unification of Germany as prime minister of Prussia in the late 1800s. Thereafter, he served as the first chancellor of the united German Empire.)

She's less fond of Jeb Bush because, well, don't get her started on the FCAT.

She supports stem cell research and thinks gay rights might be the next civil rights movement.

"I'm not a narrow-minded Republican," she says. "There won't be room for conservative Republicans anymore when I'm older. The world's changing too fast."

Besides, "When you talk to gay guys, they're hilarious. There's no girl who doesn't want to be friends with a gay guy."

Roberts: We ran for a long time. Finally you could hear my dog treeing. . . . Lions aren't good tree climbers; they only get up about 10 feet.

I shot the mountain lion with a 22-caliber pistol. Aimed between the eyes and he snarled at me, got him in the roof of the mouth. I'd climbed up to the first branch. I wanted to get close.

Jessica: Were you scared? A big giant mountain lion right over your head?

Roberts: They're not African lions. He toppled out.

"I'm picturing this tree. Here's the lion, here's the dude. The lion's ticked off because he's got a gun. People say we're the top of the food chain. They're lying. Look at the Serengeti. There's geckos in the Serengeti that could eat us.

"I don't dislike nature, it just dislikes me. I'm not a tent person. I don't like bugs. Do you know how many things you can catch from bugs? West Nile. Ticks. Lyme disease. You can be paralyzed."

Her family camps. In a 45-foot tour bus. "We camp with our traveling satellite and DVD player and stereo with surround sound. This is camping, people. In the 21st century."

Roberts: I get back with the lion and the dog. The truck's gone. I'm in the middle of nowhere. I made a fire.

Jessica's slapping her cell phone.

"I don't think you'd get reception there," she says. "That'd be the end of my life. What did people do before cell phones? He's like, "I took my compass marking,' and I'm like, "And that helps how?' "

Roberts: Our first house was in Concord, N.H. My wife yelled at me. Did you ever drip blood of a dead deer on your bedspread?

Jessica: Can't say I have.

She loves the rhetorical questions. Gets them all the time. Her favorite: "Have you ever walked in a 7-foot Frankenstein costume through a kitchen in Japan?"

She can't say that she has.

That was a guy named Harley. He talked about how he just wanted to see his great-granddaughter one more time. A week and a half later, as soon as the great-granddaughter had visited, he went ahead and died.

A couple of months later, she was in the bookstore and Harley's daughter tapped her on the shoulder, then began to cry. Then they both were hugging and crying in the middle of the bookstore, and Jessica's friend was staring at her like she'd gone nuts.

"I'm an emotional person," she says. "My friends don't understand. Our generation is so emotionally detached because our generation has never experienced loss."

She figures her grandmother will be the first person really close to her to die. Her grandmother is going strong at 90. Jessica plans to make a video of her someday.

In the meantime, Jessica reads the obituaries, an old person's habit. Her father hands her that section of the paper in the mornings.

"Know anybody?" he asks.

Roberts: There was a fellow in Bow, he made pine coffins. Sold them to undertakers for $100 a coffin and made from pure pine. He came to me one day, and lo and behold the undertakers were now buying cardboard coffins. There was leakage, bodies falling out. . . . I put a bill into the New Hampshire Legislature. Wrote it up beautifully. Lo and behold, we put up a law . . . no cardboard coffins in the state of New Hampshire. He was happy as hell and told everybody, and I was re-elected.

Jessica: You wrote it yourself?

Roberts: You just la-dee-dah it up as much as you can. Lucky the cardboard people didn't have a lobbyist up there.

You'd think it would be strange, to talk to a hospice patient about coffins. Jessica does not.

Dying people rarely talk about death. She thinks she'd be bitter about it, if the situation were reversed. But only one woman felt that way.

"She had a bad life. She lived like 13 years in a tent and danced with Dean Martin in a bar. I'm like, "Oh, that's so cool.' She said, "Oh no, he's an old tired dead guy.'

"She was cussing. I said, "If you could do it all over again, would you? She said, "Ah, hell no, haven't you been listening?' "

Jessica doesn't think about the patients dying either, except when she gets near the end of the interview and she asks if they have any advice for their family members.

Then it hits her, for a second.

Jessica: Do you have anything to tell the future generations?

Roberts: I have nothing to tell the future generations. They wouldn't listen to me anyway.

Well, Jessica did. It's not just processing the stories, taking note of the advice to enjoy life and avoid grudges. It's making room for other people in a life that would revolve around her if she let it.

This has stayed with her:

"Once, I did a birthday party for the hospice cheer team. It was at a normal house in a normal neighborhood where like five of my friends live. The woman, she was really close, one of the worst I've seen. She could barely sit there, barely eat her cake or anything.

"Her daughter was doing the lean-against-the-wall-and-slide-down thing, crying. Her son was crying, trying to put her back in bed.

"I went outside and looked at the house. It looked so normal, like nothing is going on in there.

"Now when I drive around, I look at all the houses, like, "What's going on in there?' "

Maybe a mother composing a last message to her boy. Maybe a sister leaning against the wall, sliding to the floor.

When she left Roberts' unit at On Top of the World, he was cheerful and she was cheerful and it was a beautiful day. She thanked him and told him how inspiring he was and that maybe she'd like to be a lobbyist someday.

From the parking lot, all the units looked like playhouses, the landscape decorated with minarets, Greek columns, statues of gods and goddesses, cherubs and cupids.

It seemed like nothing real could ever possibly happen there, behind those rows of identical doors.

Kelley Benham can be reached at 727 893-8848 or benham@sptimes.com

[Last modified March 24, 2005, 09:03:04]