© Abbas/Magnum Photos
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.
Mom died, at 67, in 2009, but lately I've been reflecting on her last days. I'm applying to medical school, and her story keeps coming up in my essays and interviews. Her death spurred me to apply, partly because it gave me courage — nothing in med school could be worse than watching the way my mother died. Her death was so grisly that I vowed to help change the way people die in America.
Mom had a chronic liver condition, an autoimmune disease that had been under control for years but suddenly worsened. After her liver failed, her kidneys followed, then her lungs. After four months in the I.C.U. she was on 24-hour dialysis, with a breathing tube down her throat and a feeding tube up her nose. She hated all the tubes; her hands were tied to the bed so she couldn't pull them out.
She needed a liver transplant, but was too sick to survive one. Then a fungal infection invaded her lungs, dodged the antibiotics and spread through her body. On a Friday afternoon in August, our family met with the doctors. If we left Mom on life support, the fungus would eat her alive, putrefying her innards, turning her fingers black. It would be a cruel death, they said.
It's already been a cruel death, I thought.
Comment: "We shop because we're bored, anxious, depressed or angry, and we make the mistake of buying material goods and thinking they are treats which will fill the hole, soothe the wound, make us feel better. The problem is, they're not treats, they're responsibilities and what we own very quickly begins to own us."
See also: The vicious cycle of addictive buying has consumed the average American's life