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It was almost 46 years ago, but I'll never forget the moment I last saw my mother, quite literally white as a sheet, being rolled away from me on a hospital gurney. I would never see her again and, to this day, regret that I couldn't have been at her side when she died. My father, who had a stroke when my mother was so desperately ill -- I was endlessly at his side -- partially recovered and lived on for another six years. I would one day find him seated dead in his bathroom, the dad I knew having visibly fled his body, leaving his open eyes empty of everything, or so it seemed to me then and still does today.
I was relatively young, just 33 years old, when my mother died and yet such moments live with you into the years when you begin to become your parents. And I had it easy all in all. Mine had enough money that we could hire someone remarkably caring to be with my dad in those last years of his life. As TomDispatch regulars Priti Gulati Cox and Stan Cox suggest today in telling their own moving tales of the deaths of their mothers, all too many of us on this planet have no such luck.
In fact, in so many places, life and death, such as it is, seems almost unimaginable to me. Just the other day, for instance, I read a New York Times report on Afghanistan, the country the U.S. left in the dust of history after 20 years of devastating, disastrous war-making. In that land where the Taliban are once again in control and women can no longer get a college education or work for a nongovernmental organization, while international aid of any sort has largely been halted, many children were already starving. As Times journalists Christina Goldbaum and Yaqoob Akbary report, this winter has proven a frigid hell of an extreme sort in that wounded land. Here's a description they offer of a single life (and death) there:
"One particularly cold night, [Niaz Mohammad] piled every stick and every shrub he had collected into their small wood stove. He scavenged for trash that might burn, covered the windows with plastic tarps and held his 2-month-old son close to his chest. But the cold was merciless" Soon the infant fell silent in his arms. His tears turned to ice that clung to his face. By daybreak, he was gone." Imagine when it's not your parents but your child dying" Frozen in your arms. What a hell on Earth!
And with all of that in mind, let me turn you over to Priti Gulati, Stan, and their mothers' last moments on this ever more embattled planet of ours. Tom
A Tale of Two Mothers
Dying with Dignity and What Makes That Possible
By Priti Gulati Cox and Stan Cox
So many crises -- from war to mass species die-offs to climate meltdown -- afflict our world that we often don't take time to draw insights from what generally passes for the small stuff, the things that happen all too close to home, including aging. Most of us don't relish the prospect of getting old, much less watching our parents approach their deaths, something that's even worse if you're dying poor.
Having a parent die, whatever the circumstances, is bound to be wrenching. The best we daughters and sons can hope for is that our parents finish out their lives on their own terms and where they want to be -- with loved ones nearby and suffering as little as possible. In recent years, the deaths of our own mothers at opposite ends of the globe seemed to highlight, in some modest fashion, the experiences of women who suffer debilitating health problems late in life, as well as the deep humanity and kindness shown them by the people whose work it is to help them exit this world in comfort and with dignity.
Priti's mother Santosh Gulati and Stan's mother Brenda Cox were born just four months apart in 1932-1933 and died four years apart in 2018 and 2023. Both lived through an era in which most women's existences were still bound by the decisions men made. Still, they achieved a great deal despite such constraints and enjoyed relatively good health, only to be hit hard by medical problems in their last years.
During her final decade, Santosh battled breast cancer while also suffering the physical and mental anguish of a rare neurological disease, progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP). She succumbed in 2018, at age 86. In her last decade, Brenda endured the ravages of severe osteoporosis, including chronic, ever-increasing pain from a cascade of excruciating fractures in her spine, along with a broken ankle and fractured hips. In her final five years, she was also stricken by rapidly advancing dementia. She died this February at 90.
Brenda's Story
In late 2018, Stan's family began facing a conundrum experienced daily around the world: What will we do when Brenda can no longer take care of herself? Stan's daughter Sheila answered that question admirably by quitting her job in Kansas and moving to Georgia to care for her then-85-year-old grandmother full-time. A year later, the Covid-19 pandemic struck. Had Sheila not been able and willing to give four years of her life to such work, Brenda might have ended up dying earlier in a care institution, isolated, with advancing dementia -- and like so many less fortunate elderly people in those darkest pandemic days, having to say her final goodbyes by telephone. Instead, for almost three years, Brenda stayed out of Covid-19's path and within reach of her far-flung family, even as her pain, physical disability, and dementia worsened. Then, one day in mid-December 2022, the pandemic finally came for her, carried most likely by a well-wishing visitor.
As her decline accelerated through January, she began losing her ability to swallow (partly because of her dementia), and the resulting aspiration of food and fluids worsened the pneumonia that had plagued her for months before she caught Covid. There was no way to reverse her decline. Before she was discharged from the hospital for the last time, her doctor asked us whether we wanted her problems to be treated "aggressively" with a feeding tube, intravenous fluids, and antibiotics, or whether we'd prefer to drop the losing battle with aspiration.
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