This is supposed to sum up several comments.

Patrick McManus wrote:
> Of course the risk here is that they suddenly perk up again !!!!P
>   
That was a real fear, and I mean Fear.  She went into the hospital on a 
Sunday night in February and died late Wednesday afternoon.  On Monday 
night I'd called her one surviving sibling, her brother, and he ripped 
me a new asshole Just Because he was understandably upset.  But then, on 
Tuesday, the doctor told me she was stabilizing.  He was talking about 
sending her back to the nursing home if she leveled off.  I went into a 
panic.  It was quite selfish...I could not bear the idea of going 
through that emotional racking again until the NEXT alarm which might or 
might not be false.  I didn't want to have to jerk around my immediate 
and extended family.  I was actually and irrationally quite furious at 
my mother for remaining alive, as though this were some sort of sick 
game of Now She's Breathing, Now She's Not.

Read the next paragraph only if you like mysticism in everyday life.

By Wednesday morning I'd more or less accepted the uncertainty of the 
situation, and went back to work.  But precisely at noon that day I 
suddenly had this inexplicable feeling or inner command, if you like, 
that I had to go to the hospital NOW.  I arrived an hour later and the 
nurse told me my mother's vital signs quit registering--precisely at 
noon--and that she'd be dead within hours if not sooner.  That was 1 
PM.  The nurse told me to talk to her because even the comatose can 
hear.  I did.  I said pretty much what was in that ur-poem.  And at 4:06 
she was gone.

You can't make this stuff up.  Or *I* can't, anyway.  It felt in 
retrospect like H.P. Lovecraft Meets the 36 Righteous of Israel.

For several years thereafter I was visited by a dream of walking into a 
room that looked like it was part of Miss Haversham's house, only to 
find Mom sitting in a wing chair demanding this, that, and the other. 

As far as David Rieff's memoir, a radio interview, even with Terry 
Gross, can only be a talking promotional blurb.  I need to read the book 
because what I heard in the 15 minute drive from the train station to my 
house triggered off what I wrote when I got home, one sitting, very 
little changed.  I am sure...and I do mean I am convinced...that Rieff 
was pleading with Something for his mother to just die, to let go and be 
free of the pain of watching her suffer pain.  Some people here have 
parents die, and even if it is a mercy, even if you didn't like them 
very much, it's still a wrench.  I suppose we are all from our mothers' 
wombs untimely ripp'd even if it takes 48 years.

Ken

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Kenneth Wolman			kenwolman.wordpress.com
    Abuse of power comes as no surprise--Jenny Holzer