“We have calcium in our bones, iron in our veins, carbon in our souls, and nitrogen in our brains. 93 percent stardust, with souls made of flames, we are all just stars that have people names.” – Nikita Gill
Mom in the Grand Tetons, 1981
On the next-to-last day in January, the local medical supply company delivered a hospital bed to my parents’ house and helped set it up in my mother’s home office, the room she had chosen to die in. It was a Thursday, and I remember thinking, “Wait—this is really happening? She isn’t changing her mind? She’s actually going through with it?”
Until that moment, I had comforted myself with a constant litany of denial: She won’t be able to cut out sugar ahead of time, so she won’t even begin the process. Or, she’ll cut out sugar, but she’ll change her mind before she stops eating and drinking completely. Or, she’ll start and then quit, and then we can forget about the whole thing. I seized on anything and everything to distract myself from what my mother had said for three years she intended to do: die a natural death by refusing food and water before her dementia could reach the later stages. To do this meant she had to give up good days in order to avoid bad years, a fact I had accepted intellectually but failed, apparently, to truly internalize.
Homodramatica 