Life Support

By the winter of 2026, my mother’s illness had begun to change the rhythm of our lives. She was having more difficult days, and I was spending more nights at her apartment. Usually, I slept in the second bedroom. But on January 28th, her oxygen had been dipping, and I had a feeling I should stay close to her. So I climbed into bed beside her.

Sometime in the middle of the night, the sound of her falling woke me. I got out of bed and found my mother unconscious on the floor. For a few seconds, the world narrowed to just the two of us—her frail body on the floor and my panic. I dropped beside her, calling her name, touching her face, begging her to wake up. Slowly, she began to come back to me. I pulled her upright and into my arms and held her there on the floor, kissing her forehead and saying the only thing I could think to say. I love you. I love you. I love you. Then I reached for my phone and screamed for 911.

Everything after that comes back to me in fragments: the apartment suddenly filled with paramedics. The lights on. The front door open in the middle of the night. Questions being asked faster than I could answer them. My black Labrador, Lexa, howling in a way I had never heard before, as if she understood before I did that something terrible was happening. I left for the hospital in my pajamas. Outside, there was snow on the ground. New York was still dark.

By 4:30 a.m., we were in the emergency room. By 8 a.m., my mother was behind a BiPAP mask receiving 100 percent oxygen. I sat beside her watching the mask cover most of the face I knew better than my own. Doctors told me she was very sick. Things could change quickly, they said. She might not make it. And then I looked at the time. At 9 a.m., my mother had a mediation over Zoom.

It had been on the calendar for weeks. My parents were nearing the end of a divorce that had stretched on for nearly six years, and my mother was supposed to participate. She obviously couldn’t. So I would take the Zoom call in her place. I remember looking at the clock. There was something absurd about the fact that it was still keeping time. My mother might be dying. And we had a 9 a.m.

After nearly six years, the process had developed its own terrible momentum. Even this didn’t seem capable of stopping it. We had become so desperate to bring it to an end that somehow, sitting in an emergency room with my mother struggling to breathe, not showing up still didn’t feel like an option. So I showed up. I took the call from the hospital while my mother lay behind me.

I recall very little of the mediation itself. What I remember is the feeling of moving between two realities that had no business occupying the same hour. In one, there were practical questions requiring practical answers. In the other, my mother was struggling to breathe.

I had imagined losing my mother constantly. She had been sick for years. I knew, intellectually, that she could die. I had rehearsed her death privately in ways I didn’t entirely admit to myself. I had imagined the phone call, the hospital, the goodbye. I had imagined what I would say if I knew I was speaking to her for the last time. I had wondered how I would survive the first night without her, the first morning, the first birthday.

What I hadn’t imagined was everything else that would be happening at the same time. I hadn’t imagined that one of the worst moments of my life might arrive in the middle of an otherwise scheduled day. I hadn’t imagined that catastrophe would coexist so easily with the mundane. There would still be calls to answer. Emails coming in. Lawyers and a judge who needed decisions. A dog who still needed to be walked. A phone that still needed to be charged.

I think this is one of the strangest things about anticipatory grief: you begin losing someone while she is still sitting beside you. There is no clean dividing line between before and after. One moment I was looking at my mother behind an oxygen mask, trying to comprehend the possibility that I might lose her. The next I was thinking about what I needed to say on a phone call. Then I was her daughter again. Then I was handling something. Then I was watching the monitor. Then someone needed an answer. Then I was looking at her.

It felt almost obscene to be functioning. And yet I did. We both did. My mother vaguely understood what was happening, even though she would later have no memory of that morning. She needed to know the divorce was settled—that the agreement was signed and that what she had fought for would be protected. It was as though she would not allow herself to let go until she knew that part was finished.

My mother couldn’t attend the mediation, so I did. It sounds simple now. At the time, I didn’t realize that I had already begun doing this in a hundred smaller ways. Little by little, as she became less able to carry the weight of her own life, I had begun carrying it with her—and, eventually, for her.

There is something about having a sick parent that slowly rearranges the architecture of a family. At first, the changes are small enough that you barely notice them. You accompany her to an appointment. You learn the names of medications. You take notes when a doctor speaks. You begin knowing things you never used to need to know. And then one day you realize that you are standing between the person who always protected you and a world she can no longer entirely manage herself.

By that winter, my mother’s world had become smaller. She was losing her independence. She was increasingly housebound. Things she had once done without thinking now required help. I checked her oxygen. I made sure she took the right medications. I helped her wash up and tucked her into bed at night. I would kiss her, hold her hand, and tell her how much I loved her. Even then, she slept in the beautiful silk nightgowns and pajamas she had brought home from Paris. There was something quintessentially her about it. Her circumstances had changed considerably; her sense of herself had not.

These were intimate acts I had never imagined performing for her. A parent washes you, dresses you, puts you to bed. Then, if you are given enough time together, there can come a strange and tender reversal. You begin doing those things for them. At the time, I thought I was taking care of my mother. Only now do I understand that I was also saying goodbye to her. I just didn’t know it yet. Or maybe I did. Maybe that is the hardest thing to admit.

She had been dying for some time. We simply couldn’t quite face it. Not because nobody told us she was sick. We knew she was sick. Not because I didn’t understand what her illness could mean. I understood too much. But knowing that someone can die and understanding that they are actually dying are two entirely different things.

For years, I thought grief began when someone died. Now I know that sometimes it begins much earlier. It begins when the future quietly changes tense. “We will” becomes “we were going to.” “Next summer” becomes “maybe.” “When she gets better” becomes something you are suddenly afraid to say out loud.

Every summer we would go to Ramatuelle, France. At the end of each trip, I would sit on Plage de Pampelonne and try to hold on to everything—the light, the feel of the water between my toes, the sounds of French, Italian, German, and English drifting from the tables at Le Club 55, and my mother beside me. I would almost hold my breath, as though staying perfectly still could somehow preserve the moment. Somewhere inside me, I always knew: This could be our last summer here together. And every summer, I was grateful to be wrong. I would do anything to go back to one of those afternoons now. For ten years, I grieved her there, even while she was still beside me.

Anticipatory grief has a particular cruelty: the person you are grieving is still there. You can still touch her. You can still hope. How do you prepare yourself for a world without someone without somehow giving up on the possibility that she will remain in it?

I couldn’t. So I moved between the two. I prepared and refused to prepare. I thought about death and then wouldn’t indulge in thinking about it. And in between, I continued living. I answered emails. I made appointments. I walked the dog. I charged my phone. I kept going.

I think I assumed there would be some unmistakable threshold between being sick and dying. Some moment when we would understand that we had crossed from one into the other. Instead, ordinary life kept happening around something enormous. There were doctors’ appointments and medications, phone calls and paperwork, good days that made me hopeful again and bad days I convinced myself we could recover from. There was no single moment when dying announced itself.

She made it through that morning on the BiPAP. She came home two weeks later. And because she had recovered from another crisis, it became possible once again to believe that she would continue surviving. Serious illness can do that. Every crisis you make it through begins to feel like evidence that you might make it through the next one. She had made it through this. She had made it through things before. Maybe she would make it through whatever came next.

So life resumed. Not the life we had known before, exactly. A smaller life. A more precarious one. A life increasingly organized around what my mother could and could not do. But she was here. And when someone you love is still here, here can feel like enough.

She lived for almost three more months. She died on April 23rd.

After she died, I began looking backward. Grief does that. It makes an archivist of you. You revisit conversations. You study photographs. You reconstruct days. You remember things that seemed insignificant when they happened and suddenly understand that they were not insignificant at all. And when I looked backward, I began to see something I couldn’t allow myself to see while she was alive.

My mother had been dying.

Not just on April 23rd. Not just in the final days. Not just when someone finally used words that made death impossible to avoid. She had been dying that winter as her world grew smaller. She had been dying as I tucked her into bed. She had been dying while we made plans for summer. She had been dying while I helped her wash up and put on her beautiful silk pajamas. She had been dying on January 29th, when I found her on the floor. And still, we talked about tomorrow.

I used to wonder how people could fail to understand that someone they loved was dying. Now I understand. You don’t necessarily fail to see it. You see everything. You see the oxygen. You see the weakness. You see the medications. You see someone who once moved through the world independently begin needing help crossing a room. You see all of it. You simply cannot assemble those facts into the sentence you are most afraid to say: My mother is dying.

Because saying it feels like participating in it. And because she is still right there. Still laughing sometimes. Still annoyed by things. Still asking what you’re wearing. Still having opinions. Still wanting a certain tea. Still herself. How could someone so alive be dying?

That was the contradiction I couldn’t understand until after she was gone. Dying and living are not opposites in the way I once thought they were. For those final months, my mother was doing both. And so was I. I was grieving her and loving her. Preparing for her death and planning for her future. Taking care of her and still needing her to take care of me. Watching her disappear in certain ways while refusing to imagine her gone.

Maybe anticipatory grief is not actually preparation for death. It certainly didn’t prepare me. Nothing could have. Maybe it is simply what happens when love begins to understand something before the rest of you is capable of accepting it.

For the moment, I was given the strange privilege and agony of continuing to love someone I was already beginning to lose. And through all of it, the world kept moving. That may still be the part I find hardest to understand.

Love, I learned, wasn’t always tender or graceful. Sometimes it was practical. Sometimes it was exhausting. Sometimes it was stubborn. It was caring for her in all the small ways she had once cared for me. More than anything, it was the relentless refusal to give up on someone I loved, even as I was beginning to understand that loving her might not be enough to make her stay.

And sometimes love is 8 a.m. on a snowy day in January. Your mother is beside you, breathing through a mask delivering 100 percent oxygen. Someone has just told you she might die. And somehow, the day still expects something from you.

It is almost nine. And somehow, there is still somewhere you are supposed to be.