My mother’s nurse is a stout woman with perpetually pink cheeks and a tendency to call everyone sugar. Freida dutifully prepares the chopped kale salads and wheatgrass smoothies my mother prefers, but I suspect she laces the brownies with pot.
Whatever we’re paying the agency, it isn’t enough.
I like her so much I can almost forget that she isn’t a regular nurse. She’s a hospice nurse, part of a whole hospice team that consulted with my mother for weeks when we moved here.
Daddy died in the middle of my first art gallery show, to the shock of everyone.
What came after, the will and its humiliation, that was a surprise, too.
My mother seems determined to die in exactly the opposite way—slowly, with every stage planned out. I’m sure it comes from a kindness, a wish to prevent the kind o
