My mother and father never married. This meant, as my mother explained, that I was his legal next of kin, responsible for making his medical decisions. This responsibility, already complex because of his lack of a living will, would prove to be even more fraught because he and I barely knew each other.
I had cried after learning about my father’s coma, and I had cried when I made the decision to let him go. Actually, what I did went well beyond crying; it was more like an exorcism of repressed emotions, my body shuddering. But the news of his recovery — practically a resurrection — rendered me emotionless. There was no sense of joy, no feeling of shock or relief, just a keen understanding of my own powerlessness.
The philosophy of selfhood became real when my mother got dementia
At first, my mother, the poet Anne Atik, had seemed just ordinarily confused. Then, very gradually, the confusion took on a pathological aspect. She...
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