Not Just a Death, a System Failure

On the day before my mother died, she gave my father a list of demands. He wrote them on the back of an envelope and showed them to me as he left the intensive care unit. There, in his clear block handwriting, it read:

CREAM

WHISKEY

HEROIN

My mother was not herself. And yet, she was completely herself. When Mom’s liver stopped working, her brain, which we had always considered loopy, grew addled. But she was still funny. She hallucinated monkeys on unicycles circling her bed. She learned that Michael Jackson had died, “probably from all that plastic surgery,” she said. She remembered Sarah Palin, and thought she was a twit.

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