Listening to my mother die

Making a life and death medical decision from 5,000 miles away

Swollen and feverish, infection ravaging and bloating your weak body as if trying to escape at the seams of your skin. Tubes and beeps and moaning from delirious patients next to you. No privacy in death. When they finally turned off all the machines they said it might take a long time, days maybe. But you left so quickly, it was surprising to the heaps of snot and tears by your bedside. Like you’d been waiting to be released. Not in a spiritual way. Just in the way of hearts and lungs coming to a defiant halt after being pulled and prodded along.

Nearly a week before, I hear you take your last independent breaths. They are rattling groans, hoarse whimpers, more animal than human. Get me out! Get me out! You howl with the desperation of someone who waited too long and now it’s too late, your voice deep and brittle. I helplessly listen to you through the phone a million miles away in my own world, my own life, where our relationship merely exists through this, the phone. I sit in my kitchen in the dark, my body shaking so violently, my heart throbbing so heavily against my throat. I hear you gasping for air and order the doctor to give you oxygen. They already are and still you are drowning.

I remember you don’t want to be intubated and argue with the doctor who calmly explains that…