Trying to die

My mother tried very hard to die. She stopped eating – everything.  To avoid nagging from me and other carers she became sly at pretending to eat, or at devising reasonable excuses why she couldn't... just yet.  With such cunning that I often doubted her dementia.  

Eventually, we all stopped pretending and watched in horror as her body consumed all its remaining fat deposits – cheeks, chin, buttocks. Her stomach  hung like a hammock from her hip bones.

Sometimes Myra became so ill I’d think she was about to succeed in her deathwish. Seeing her agony and reading terror in her sunken eyes, I’d make calls to the doctor, take her to hospital for scans and tests, insist she took the prescribed pills. She railed at being ‘prodded and poked, carted about, bothered with’.  In hospital waiting rooms this dignified woman  became shockingly rude. I felt frustrated to the point of sullen fury and worse, like a traitor for trying to sabotage her plan.

Trying to die isn’t like trying to commit suicide – it may actually be harder, because what you are trying to do is what you least want to have happen; you dread it but there it is and it must be done, and by no one but you. 

Philip Roth
( Granta 24, May 2019)

R.I.P
SHIRLEY MYRA MILLER (née BELL)
 1934 – 2019

One afternoon I cuddled up to what was left of her and cried like a child.  She tried to cradle me like a mother. 
-  Don't cry, darling. It will be alright.
-  What if your pain is from cancer?
- Well then I’ll die from cancer.
- But you might need serious pain medication.
- No more pills.
 
Sometimes, for a few days or weeks she’d forget not to eat and drink, put on a few grams and get back to making political predictions:
 
That Boris Johnson, he’ll be next Prime Minister, mark my words.

To transgenderise Roth writing about his father: 
​
It would seem that to prevail here, to try dying and to do it, she would have to work even harder than she did in the [selling] business, where she achieved a remarkable success for a woman with her educational handicaps. Of course, here too she … eventually succeed[ed] – through … the assiduous application she gave to every job ever assigned to her. 
                                                        (ibid)