This is a guest post by Gowri Parameswaran on behalf of her mother Sulochana

“Life changes in the instant, the ordinary instant” wrote Joan Didion in her book The Year of Magical Thinking. Didion wrote about her attempts to cope with her husband’s death and her reference was to the moment of his passing. I had picked up the book in JFK and had completed it by the time I reached Chennai. I needed the sustenance that the book seemed to offer; I was coming to see and take care of my mother (Amma we called her) who had been admitted to the hospital with decompensated lungs for the third time in two months. Her heart was too sluggish to pump her blood through the arteries and the fluid had backed up into her lungs; her lungs were decompensated. I remembered the ominous prognosis that one book on Heart Failure had spelled out about this turn of events in her health – that this was a seminal indication that the heart had reached the end of the road. She seemed so normal when I left her in October. The doctor had pronounced her heart healthy under the circumstances.

“Life changes in the instant,

The ordinary instant”. Continue reading A Daughter’s Plea For A Better Way to Die: Gowri Parameswaran →