The Long Goodbye by Meghan O'Rourke

way your family did, dying where it was hard for your whole family to be with you and where excessive measures might be taken to keep you alive past a moment that called for letting go. I didn’t want that for my mother. I wanted her to be able to go home. I didn’t want to pretend she wasn’t going to die.
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    Eamon stayed with her that night. When I came the next day to spell him, she told me what a nice time they’d had. “He just needed to see me,” she said. “He needed to watch a movie and talk.” Our mother! Here she was. Surely she would never leave us again; we needed her.
    â€œI think Eamon’s hitting it off with the nurse,” she continued. “She comes in a lot more when he’s visiting.”
    â€œWhich one?” I said, hitting the morphine button to give her a boost, which made me feel I wasn’t useless.
    â€œChristine—Nicole—I can’t remember. They all have names like Christine or Nicole.”
    My father called that afternoon to say that he and Eamon had the stomach flu and were throwing up. He wanted to know if I could stay another night.
    My mother needed to see a local oncologist before the hospital would let her go home: more emergencies might occur, and she wouldn’t be going to New York anymore to see Mears. It was a Saturday, and the only oncologist around was a doctor named Malefatto. After a silent double take—his name, traced to Italian roots, sounded a lot like Dr. “Wrongdoing” or Dr. “Badly Done”—I asked the nurse to send him to our room when he did rounds.
    Dr. Badly Done turned out to be kind. And he did well something that is easily done badly: he told my mother she had a few days or weeks left to live, a fact she had not quite taken in. It was his job to tell her that she had to decide whether she wanted to become a “hospice patient”—to receive only pain management rather than major interventions. He said something about “what remained to be done”; my mother misunderstood him and said she didn’t want any chemotherapy. He corrected her: “There’s really no more chemotherapy we can do,” he said. In that moment, I saw my mother realize, anew, what she had realized earlier that fall when Mears had told her there were no remaining treatments.
    â€œSo,” she said slowly, “there is nothing left to do?”
    â€œNo,” said Dr. Malefatto.
    My mother’s face grew still. I could see how strange this was to her, as it was to me. Five days earlier, she’d been walking around, even going to work for an hour here and there. Now she couldn’t stand without one of us lifting her. How had we gotten here so fast? Then she looked at me.
    â€œI have to call your father and tell him,” she said. I didn’t say: He already knows.
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    Things My Mother Said:
    To my father: “All right, I’ll go to bed, but only if I can walk backward.”
    To all of us: “I’d really like to get into a nice pair of terjamas.”
    To the three-year-old daughter of a friend at her school: “I have a boo-boo, too.”
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    O NE OF THE IDEAS I’ve clung to most of my life is that if I just try hard enough it will work out. If I work hard, I will be spared, and I will get what I desire, finding the cave opening over and over again, thieving life from the abyss. This sturdy belief system has a sidecar in which superstition rides. Until recently, I half believed that if a certain song came on the radio just as I thought of it, it meant that all would be well. What did I mean? I preferred not to answer that question. To look too closely was to prick the balloon of possibility. I also held the delusion that the imperfect could be fixed by attention. And so in the hospital I was always eager to show the nurses what I knew, how much I had learned, including the fact that I had to prostrate myself before