Published July 3, 2026

It was early afternoon on a Monday. We’d gone that morning to the hospital in Houston to sit with her as they took her off the ventilator and let it happen.

I’d been there for her last 19 days of life on Earth. This one would end soon. Her body, sapped of its ability to keep itself alive because of complications from lymphoma, would surrender once she was disconnected from the machine. The way it ended was in accordance with her living will.

I’ve told the story many times. Sitting in a chair next to her bed, I held her left hand in mine. At 1:13 p.m. I felt a surge of some kind pass through my hand, arm and whole body, an energy surge, and I knew that the breath we’d just heard would be her last.

Mom died 20 years ago today. She was 75.

I struggled with taking her off the ventilator. More than 20 years removed from being a part of any formal religion or church, I asked to speak to the hospital chaplain on duty the day before. He helped bring me to some peace with this action we were about to take.

Almost all of the women I knew on my dad’s side of the family lived until their late 80s or into their 90s. Mom got a bad deal. So did Dad, who died at 52.

She was unable to speak or look at us for the last three weeks of her life. Doctors had put her in a medically induced coma so she could tolerate the ventilator. When they tried to bring her out of the coma to see if she could breathe on her own — I think it was July 2 — her eyes opened, and she had a look of panic, of terror, as she stared at where the ceiling met the top of the far wall. She kept shaking her head.

No, no, no, I imagined she was thinking. I imagined other things, including who she might have been looking at who we couldn’t see.

“Can’t catch a break,” she’d written on a small whiteboard a few months earlier, unable to speak. Her condition was getting worse.

On the eve of Independence Day, it was time to let her go.

Photo by Patrik Slezak via Shutterstock.

♥

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