MOMMENTARY |
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Sunday, January 04, 2009 ( 11:06 AM ) Elinor Dashwood Well, December was crazy. In the first place, my mother died, aged ninety. She fell and struck her head, causing bleeding into the brain. In view of her age and frailty, the doctor advised against an operation to clear out the hematoma, and she was moved to the hospice part of the hospital. There she was comfortable and received water and medication, and all her children visited her. By the time I got there she was unconscious, but it's impossible to tell how much a person in that state hears - patients sometimes come out of comas and relate long conversations that took place in their presence - so we spoke to her. I felt odd talking to someone who didn't respond, so I mostly sang the things she used to like to hear me sing. She died very peacefully, not many hours after I saw her last. It had been in my mind for the past few years, as my mother got older and vaguer, that there might be a quarrel in the family about the circumstances of her death. I'm the last practicing Catholic, as far as I know, and I wasn't sure whether my brothers and sisters understood, or were prepared to abide by Catholic principles about end-of-life care. I did them an injustice in that. Nobody was reaching for the lethal injection, and it even turned out that the one I expected to be the most worldly was the hardliner about wanting to try the surgery in the teeth of the doctor's recommendation. I suppose, as even the idiot Peter Singer conceded under similar circumstances, it's different when it's your mother. Anyway, she was well taken care of, was visited by a priest, and had all her children with her in her last days. That's a pretty good way to go. Requiescat in pace, Mama. # |
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