I am still a snuffleufflepeg, in spite of spending more of the weekend asleep than awake, so I am at home in my sweats, guzzling down hot liquids and working up the energy to work on financial reports and correspondence.

Which includes writing to the folks who sent my mother Christmas cards. Which is not that hard a task, all things considered, but I haven't opened their cards yet, because yeah, who's keen to be the bearer of sad news? Particularly to people who've known her since, oh, 1974?

And part of my not-dealing-with-it-just-yet has been to catch up on the weekend's newspapers, and in the New York Times book review, there's a review-essay of a book by a woman whose mother died of cancer, and I am struck by the discussion of this part in particular:

Romm [the daughter] goes to Jackie [the mother] and confesses that she cannot bring herself, as the others have urged her, to say "it's OK to die."...Her speech slurred through the oxygen mask, Jackie answers, "Sweetheart, I dun need your permission."

Before my mother died, I was pretty firmly in favor of euthanasia-on-demand for the terminally ill, at least in theory. Having watched my father die ten years ago and witnessed firsthand the limits of palliative care, I was of the opinion that forcing anyone else to endure life past their body's functions was naively cruel (e.g., I felt some of my friends who were adamantly against euthanasia had never seen what it was like for someone who could no longer swallow liquid, or how drugs don't actually alleviate all discomfort). That said, I've been all too aware of how easily the concept could be abused in actual practice (one of my oldest friends has been firmly against the movement in part because she has a disabled sibling) ...

...and I'm all the more aware and ambivalent about the potential abuses and pressures now. One thing you have to understand about my mother was that she was frugal to a fault. One of her last acts was to yell at me for wasting money when I brought in a flower arrangement my mother-in-law had asked me to purchase on her behalf. She actively resisted going to the hospital because of the expense, she didn't want me to publish her obituary in part because of the cost, and so on. There is a part of me that is fervently glad that she and I had no choice about hurrying up her death because at least this way there is no question that she died only when her body was ready to let her die, not because of her overriding drive to save money or any unseemly desire on my part to take charge of her estate.

There is also a part of me that now believes - at least, to a degree - that living through the failure of one's body and witnessing the failure of someone else's is a process that shouldn't be hurried through except in exceptional circumstances. (You can probably think of exceptions. I can as well.) There's a passage in Alec Wilkinson's memoir My Mentor where Emmy Maxwell talks about facing up to her own imminent death from cancer as the hardest thing she's ever had to do, and ... well. My mother was in denial about being near death until the Wednesday before she died, and then she flat out asked her doctor to make it fast, and the doctor had to say "I can't do that." And then during the rest of that week, her feet turned black and her breath became more and more erratic, and there were entire, full minutes she wasn't breathing, but then her lungs would haul in another load.

And as the week wore on, the nurses would ask me if she was holding on for anything, if I was sure my brother didn't need to be there (and while I was sure what the answer would be, I finally asked my mother, just to be sure, and as expected, she said, "What for?"), and if she needed permission to go. And there was no damned way I could have let "It's okay to go" cross my lips because there was no damned way I was going to suggest in any way that she needed to hurry out of this world before her time was truly up. It was bad enough that I had to keep her hospitalization a secret from all her well-meaning friends. (To be fair, she wanted no one to see her in that condition, but it also meant there were near-hysterical messages in three languages accumulating on the answering machine that I couldn't reply to until the day she died, because people weren't leaving names or numbers and what could I have said anyhow?) It was bad enough that there was so little I could do. I did sing her lullabies and hand her ice and birddog the staff (well-meaning, but not near enough of them, and communication between shifts/departments/services was not reliable) and shut the damn door whenever people left it open (good GRIEF hospitals are noisy -- if things had been wholly up to me, I would have tried arranging for round-the-clock care at home, but that's a whole separate rant), and later, as her body kept soldiering on, I drafted poems and texted my husband and wrenched my shoulder trying to sleep in the chair, and watched and listened some more.

And all of this was complicated by the fact that I was not as close to my mother as most people are to theirs -- some of my fault, some of it hers; quite frankly, we wouldn't have had anything to do with each other if we hadn't been related -- and so there are layers of guilt and silence in the interacting with people who miss her far more than I do, or who think I should be missing her far more than I do, and the fact that I do owe her and my father so much will forever seesaw with the equally valid proposition that it's a freaking miracle I turned out as socially functional and creatively productive as I am. (And it's also a freaking miracle that my husband keeps coping with the stuff I did inherit genetically, which would include enough stubbornness and anxiety and penny-foolishness to power twenty factories of the damned -- and I'm well aware that I often overcompensate in the other direction, but that's yet another essay for another time.)

And what I've been struggling to say with all this is, I'm less convinced than ever that there's a right way for someone to die, or to "let" someone go. There was never any question about giving my dad permission to die -- he fought to live as long as he could, and he spent his last night raving "I'm still alive" over and over. I can't be objective about how my mother died: I'm fiercely relieved that I didn't have to make the choice about when she died, because I don't see how I could have said "no" if she could have had the option to die sooner, but because we were isolated, that would have left me in the position of being challenged by the rest of the family and her friends over whether that was the right call to make, and I am selfishly, utterly grateful that I don't have to put up with that.

I also can't help believing that, harrowing as those last lonely nights were in her hospital room, that there was something meant in watching her body slow down not at her convenience or at mine, but as Nature intended it to. Perhaps I would think differently had she been in more visible pain, or if I'd been worried over how to cover her bills, or... I don't know. There are so many factors. It certainly makes me less inclined to judge anyone else who chooses one way or another, but it also makes me more impatient with those with a one-process-fits-all approach (I'm afraid I was overly snippy with the hospice chaplain - the handout they provided was actually great, but I also felt that "I have my own minister" should have ended the conversation -- but I'm also prepared to admit that I'm more driven to action than commiseration at the best of times, whether it's my own pain or that of others in question.)

And, um, both my parents would be utterly horrified at me writing and posting something like this, but my instinct says that it will likely be of use or comfort to some of you reading this. (And, yeah, it helps me to voice it.) So that's that. And now I shall I turn back to working on Trust reports and other paperwork.

[Today's subject line is from Dylan Thomas's "And Death Shall Have No Dominion."]