Unraveling Grief and Love: The Haunting Journey Within "Rosie: A Memoir of Farewell"
Ten years later, when she ends her life in 2022, medical aid in dying, “what some internet wit had dubbed the MAD law—was legal in California.” Sleigh’s panic has now transmuted into aching hyperawareness: “An abyss looms between the jauntiness of my mother and me playing at suicide, and her holding, gingerly, the little brown plastic bottle of medical hemlock in her hand—her good hand, that is, not the one crippled by stroke so that it looked like a squirrel’s paw, a paw afflicted by a Parkinson’s tremor.” He describes the nightmarishness of “contacting everyone as if scheduling a birthday party, only it was a death day party, negotiating with one and all ‘what days and times might work for you.’”
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