Helen Zelon

Eight years ago, my mother died, after a long illness, and after a catastrophic fall that the inept but well-intentioned neurologist likened to a high-speed automobile impact. Her illness was only fatal, without treatment or cure, and every visit we’d had over the three last years of her life had been a ‘goodbye’ for me: Every unspoken essential was voiced, and what wasn’t said didn’t need to be. We settled on a kind of peace, a loving truce, at last. But seeing your mother leave this world for the next — which I did, and which is best left for another telling — seeing her deeply comatose yet alive, then in the space of a few breaths waxen and utterly not, to go from dying to dead — no matter how one prepares intellectually, psychologically, is a shock: a tsunami, inside the body; a flood of loss. …

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Filed in Essays & Memoir