Really, it is worse than that: my mother has become a prisoner to my grandmother's condition. She is deferring her life: envisioning its next phase (a house in the country, hip replacement surgery) but postponing any action until after my grandmother dies; planning trips, but worrying about leaving Granny 'on her own'; constantly fielding phone calls from nurses and pharmacists instead of carrying on what used to be her life. I wish I could convince my mother to detach just a little -- not to take each perceived error on the part of the nursing staff so personally, not to take personal responsibility for every aspect of my grandmother's medical care -- but I can't. My mother reacts with anger: Who am I to tell her what to do? Who but her is shouldering this burden? More than that, I feel that to make any such suggestion is to confirm my mother's worst opinion of me: that I will not be involved in her convalescence; that it is my sister, not me, on whom she can rely. So I watch helplessly as old age claims two lives instead of one.

2.

It must be a common desire for families in this situation to pretend as though none of it is happening. The standard method of avoidance (at least, the one that has appeared most readily to me) is to say that "this is not my grandmother." She is barely aware of the passage of time, I tell myself; she hardly knows where she is. Really, she is absent from her suffering; the problem is only an old woman in need of care, and a family stretched to provide it.

There is some truth to this claim. Certainly people in an advanced coma, or people who have experienced 'brain death' are not really "people" in the sense of the term that is larger than homo sapiens. Yet it is a curious trick, to set aside the inescapable reality of a person's physical, and familial, identity ("the ineluctable modality of the visible," Stephen Dedalus said) and suddenly take on a much richer philosophical understanding of human life. Now life is essentially about quality, or at least the ability to experience it. We never make such judgments in close cases - only in extreme ones. Few people today claim that prisoners, or the mentally ill, might as well be euthanized. We reserve these delicate questions for the farthest reaches of human absence.

My grandmother is a close case. Although we all know that in some sense she is "no longer herself," there are those times of clarity - the 'good days' - in which she is. These 'good days' are in some ways the worst ones, because they belie our hope that she is oblivious to what has happened to her. We all would like to believe that Granny is gone even though Frieda remains. Because if there is a part of her that is aware of what has happened, her suffering is unbearable to imagine.

That there is some boundary to suffering seems essential for our ability to exist in the presence of it. Victims of the holocaust, we're told, "go numb" or in some other way lose the ability to feel totally the horror of it. And we need them to be numb; if they were lucid in the midst of torture, how can we endure hearing of it? We want victims of car accidents to black out; we want wounded soldiers put out of their misery; and I want my grandmother not to know what is happening to her. This is what I want for my grandmother: for the sum of her life's consciousness to be that of an elegant lady, beautiful in her youth, refined in her adulthood, who never in her life wanted what has now come to pass. If equanimity is impossible for her (and I think it would be for me), let her not know what is happening to her, for as long as God requires it to happen. Or at least, let it be over soon.

Seeing what my grandmother never wanted to happen caused me to ask what she did want, what she lived for, which in turn caused me to ask the same questions of myself. Here is what was important to my grandmother: her family; prosperity in the New World; the growth and flourishing of the Jewish people; and bourgeois values like respectability, tidiness, and climbing the social ladder. Here is what is important to me: love (whether in a family or not); artistic achievement; spiritual seriousness; joy; integrity. What is important to me but I do not want to admit: prosperity; fame.

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