In Defense of Dignity

I Hate to Play the I-Just-Watched-My-Mother-Die Card—But, Um, I Just Watched My Mother Die
by DAN SAVAGE

I would need the room for a week. That's what I told the front-desk clerk at the Extended Residence Stay America Whatever when I checked in that Sunday night.

At least a week, I said, maybe longer.

My mother had already been in the hospital across the street for nearly a week by the time I arrived in Tucson. She was no stranger to hospitals over the last few years. She'd wake up to find that her breathing was more difficult, or that some new infection was exploiting her weakened immune system, or that some new debilitating side effect from the powerful drugs that were keeping her alive had emerged. My stepfather would rush her to a hospital, and she would come home a few days later having accepted some previously feared development—being hooked up to an oxygen tank, having to use a walker—as her "new normal."

The plan: I would stay in Tucson for three or four days and help my stepfather and aunt look after my mother. Then my brother Billy would fly in from Chicago, take over the helping-out duties and my hotel room, and we'd figure out what to do next.

Before going to the hotel on Sunday night, I got to play cards with my mother and read with her, and things were looking less grim than they had when my aunt called me in Seattle earlier that day and told me to get on an airplane. My mother wasn't getting better, but she wasn't getting worse.

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