Writing in the real world

The story of my mother's death is many stories. For my sister, perhaps, it is the final act of the decades-long fading away of my mother's emotional presence in our lives, the painful mystery of her lack of connection (was it the soul-wounding divorce of her parents when she was four, her alcoholism, her temperamental distaste for conflict, her growing inability to remember not only the train of a conversation but also the details of our histories?). For my brother the doctor (a phrase that recalls My Mother the Car), it is at least in part an object-lesson in the medical ethics of end-of-life issues: how to determine competence to make medical decisions when gravely ill patients suffer from some degree of dementia, how to manage communication between medical staff and family, how to weigh terminal care documents in emergency situations. I start here, now, from the safe distance of my own professional analysis, looking at and thinking about the written record of that week in April.