The Mourning of My Birth in the Wake of Grandma’s One Hundredth Year

Abstract

In this essay the author describes how she orchestrates her own death for her mother’s survival and begins to travel with her dying grandmother. She shares lessons from her grandmother’s elongated, memory-less, graceless dying through a series of vignettes. While her mother accepts the author’s proclamation of her own death, the mother mourns the simultaneous loss of her daughter and mother. In the midst of her mother’s suffering, the author shares the joyous mourning of her travels with Grandma.