Gavin Newsom on His Mother's Assisted Death

California governor Gavin Newsom held his mother's hand as she died in 2002. In his book he talks about his complicated feelings about her and her choice to have an assisted death. From the Washington Post: It was the spring of 2002 when Gavin Newsom’s mother Tessa, dying of cancer, stunned him with a voicemail. If he wanted to see her again, she told him, it would need to be before the following Thursday, when she planned to end her life. Newsom, then a 34-year-old San Francisco supervisor, did not try to dissuade her, he recounted in an interview with The Washington Post. The fast-rising politician was wracked with guilt from being distant and busy as she dealt with the unbearable pain of the breast cancer spreading through her body. Newsom’s account of his mother’s death at the age of 55 by assisted suicide, and his feelings of grief and remorse toward a woman with whom he had a loving but complex relationship, is one of the most revealing and emotional passages in the California governor’s book.

Andre Is An Idiot | Official Trailer | Joint Venture

A "no cops, no doctors" guy confronts a terminal diagnosis.

When Death Comes - Mary Oliver

The New York Times Special Supplement on Death

The New York Times begins the new year with a superb supplement called "Let's Talk About Death," with excellent articles on grief, end of life decisions,funerals, burials, and other methods for disposing of remains, writing an obituary, "death cleansing" "facing death with support, comfort, and dignity, near-death experiences, and making it easier to face all of these things and to talk to family and health care professionals about them.

What To Do With a Father's Ashes?

Reverend Danielle Tumminio Hansen is an Episcopal priest and theology professor at Emory University who specializes in "the intersection of trauma and theology." Her father's cremated remains are not, as he asked, spread in Hawaii but in her closet. In this essay, she writes that assisting in the final ceremonies of many others showed her that "ordination and a Ph.D. provide no protection from grief. They just make you vulnerable to it in a different way." Those of us storing cremated remains in corners of our home often believe our loved ones deserve something fitting and final, something more than a Ziploc bag or the cardboard box that contains it. We want to bestow an additional honor; we want to get it right. But that’s as far as we get because action would disrupt the spiritual status quo and that’s a frightening prospect. We might have to acknowledge that their mortality signifies ours, that we don’t know how or when, but one day, we too will return to dust. We might have to recognize that our faith in heaven is a little shakier than we’re letting on. We might have to own that we’re not ready to let that person go because of love or shock or unresolved conflict.

Caring for a Mother with Dementia

In Slate, Kim McLarin writes about her mother's dementia. My mother was a woman whose sharp wit and sharper tongue could be wielded either on your behalf or against your tender person, but there was no denying the weapon was formidable. To see such a woman reduced to dependency is heartbreaking. But what I feel is not just sadness. What I feel is something else.... In many ways, my mother’s life has never been this pleasant. No worrying about money, no worrying about protecting her children from the dangers of a racist society. All her needs are attended to, most desires (You want ice cream? Yes!) immediately met. My sister’s house is spacious and beautiful, far grander than any house my mother owned. More poignantly, dementia has freed my mother of a lifetime’s accumulated emotional wounds and grievances. The abandonment, the betrayal, the abuse, all largely forgotten, the pain finally softened, the memories finally dimmed. But gone too are agency and purpose and what seems to be any kind of interiority, though we can’t know this for sure. Gone is dignity, not in the sense of useless pride but in the sense of critical self-respect. Left behind is placidity atop a teeming helplessness.

Goodbye June

Kate Winslet directs and stars in "Goodbye June," coming to Netflix on December 24. She assembled an all-star cast with Dame Helen Mirren as a mother in hospice, as her family struggles with grief and with long-buried resentments and fears. Timothy Spall plays the husband who has no emotional vocabulary to express his feelings, and the adult children who struggle to process their own and find a way to support both parents are played by Winslet, Toni Collette, Johnny FLynn, and Andrea Riseborough. Flynn's character reads e.e. cummings' poem "if there are any heavens" aloud to his mother.