I paid what I thought would be my final visit during the first week of July. Having just returned from a week of silent meditation, I felt equipped to be fully present with my grandmother's suffering, and my mother's pain in the face of it. Although the trip to Florida was not planned until after my retreat had ended, I hoped that the coincidence of timing would be helpful. Maybe, I thought, I could bring to bear some of the new mindfulness practices I had learned on the situation that had presented itself; maybe I could experience directly what my family was going through, and even help to ease the pain. It worked, to a point. I practiced forbearance in the face of my mother's judgments, and practiced patience with my grandmother's barely coherent consciousness. Since I had just spent a week in silence, I was able to endure and even delight in the long lacunae in my grandmother's conversation; I allowed her sentences to unfold at their slow, disjointed pace. I did not shrink from eye contact, which seemed more intimate than her suddenly-unreliable speech. It seemed clear that this was the endgame; this was how a long life would end, in its nineties, in an assisted-living facility in Florida. So I tried to cherish the occasional moments of lucidity that appeared, like lights in a fog, in my grandmother's increasing cloud of fatigue and dementia. I even told her that my sister and I understood what she was doing, and that it was okay with us.

What happened next was an ironic turn: my grandmother's will to die itself dissolved. As she gradually lost the ability to maintain a rational train of thought, she apparently lost the concentration necessary to refuse food. Just as suddenly as it had started, and with just as little explanation, the refusal to eat stopped. My grandmother gained back some of the weight she had lost; while still extremely thin, it seemed like this wouldn't be the end after all. My mother called this an 'improvement,' though I think there was ambivalence in her voice.

And so, like a guest that has overstayed her welcome, the long goodbye has set in. It is unwanted; while there is more time to be spent with my grandmother, there is less of her to spend the time with. And this period of dependence is a betrayal of all that my grandmother stood for. Granny valued three things, she said, in her old age: her independence, her intellect (which she called her "noodle"), and the fact that she was not a burden to my mother. All three of these have been savagely, though gradually, taken away. She is no longer able to use the toilet without assistance. She is rarely able to maintain a conversation for more than two or three exchanges. And my mother has become a caregiver, shuttling back and forth, dealing with flareups, meeting with doctors to set the levels of my grandmother's medication.

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