Comfort Measures

After watching my mother die, I read her notebooks

We use euphemisms to talk about death, clichés worn smooth with use. We say things like “passed away” or “gone home” or “departed” or “at peace,” all to make it sound like dying is something common and easy. But these phrases translate the strangest thing a person will ever do — the strangest thing, perhaps, besides giving birth or being born — into something that seems like the easiest and simplest thing in the world. Dying isn’t easy or simple. Dying is hard work.

It took my mother about 36 hours to die, or maybe five hours, or maybe three weeks, depending on how you measure the progression. None of it was easy. In the days after, when we were struggling for something to say, we would say, “At least she didn’t suffer much,” and this was true; an instant without agony is a blessing. But the phrase smooths out the stomach-churning abruptness of that brutal and baffling descent she took from health and well-being into absence. The cancer spread so fast, starting in her endometrial lining, moving to her lungs, and then to her brain and her liver and to other parts of her body, which—at that point—were no longer worth keeping track of. You don’t worry about small things when the universe has contracted to only a single very big thing, and at the end, it was the only thing.