The last days of my mother, the control freak

Two weeks after my mother’s final stroke, it occurred to me she might not know she was dying.

The symptoms of her impending death were all there. She was too tired to open her eyes. She was subsisting on ice chips the size of a baby’s fingernail. Her extremities were cool, the traffic in her veins so lazy that the hospice nurses couldn’t find a pulse. Her breathing would cease for many seconds, then resume with a deep drag—until the next hiatus. She fiddled with the bedclothes and asked me what that dog was doing in the room. There was no dog.

“Do you know you’ve had two more strokes?” I asked her.

“No!”

I wasn’t surprised by her surprise. All year she’d expressed fresh astonishment each time she was informed of her condition—the first stroke that robbed her of memory and sight; the second and third that rendered her more demented, and incontinent; the fall that fractured her hip and propelled her further into frailty and confusion. “This is the first time anyone’s told me!” she’d declare.

My mother was a woman proud of being in charge. In fact, she could bear hardly a moment of not knowing what was coming next, of intellectual ambiguity or emotional irresolution.  Read Article

By Judith Levine