From 'Swimming in a Sea of Death'

The fancy that I could have consoled her is itself presumptuous. She who could talk about anything could rarely really speak of death directly, though I believe that she thought about it constantly. I remember that when I was very small, and, stricken, was just coming to understand what mortality was -- for some odd reason it had been a statue of George Washington that had set me off: the great man "wasn't" -- I tried to talk with her about it. I was desperately upset, and if not weeping, then on the verge of doing so, and she did what she could to console me. But even then, I remember noticing through the scrim of my own distress how upset she herself quickly became. And it was not long before I had the dim sense that it was I who should be consoling her, not asking for consolation. "There may be some strange, chemical immortality," she told me, and then, voice trailing off, she added, "but too late for either of us, I'm afraid."

I was too young to do anything for her then, of course. But how I would have liked to have been able somehow to console her, after that meeting with Dr. A. and through the months of her illness until her death. But instead, almost until the moment she died, we talked of her survival, of her struggle with cancer, never about her dying. I was not going to raise the subject unless she did. It was her death, not mine. And she did not raise it. To have done so would have been to concede that she might die and what she wanted was survival, not extinction -- survival on any terms. To go on living: perhaps that was her way of dying.

-- From "Swimming in a Sea of Death"