"In a Venn diagram of tending helpless people at the extremes of life, the circle of caring for a dying person overlaps almost completely with the one for caring for a baby. Both are repetitive, intimate, often gross, sometimes funny, weirdly frantic even as they’re crushingly tedious, and a total act of devotion. In the nonoverlapping part of the end-of-life circle, there’s pain, grief, despair and a dreadful fading. There is movement not forward, toward consciousness, but backward, away from it. And for all of your endless patience there is nothing at the end. Just death, and your only job is a kind of mothering right up to the lip of the abyss.
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Mothering My Dying Friend - The New York Times:
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