Another thing about raising an elderly mother: She tends to remember things a lot differently from you, and most of the time? She remembers things like she would've liked them to happen, not how they actually DID happen.
, today, we were driving to pick up baby presents for the showers I have this weekend, and we got to talking about when Dad died, like we do at least once every time we see each other. And today, she tells me that at one point when Dad was in the hospital, he told her that he hoped I never put her through what I was putting him through.
Background: Dad died from end-stage non-Hodgkin's lymphoma that had gotten into his spinal cord and ended up eating his brain within about a month's time. (This, of course, was after he'd been declared in remission, but that's another story.) Anyway, my first thought was to get a second opinion, especially since the doctor who was treating Dad CLEARLY missed the cancer's spread, but Mother had already decided that that was it for him, because they apparently had talked, and he said no heroic measures.
Now, I'm definitely of the opinion that if someone is terminal, they should have the right to die the way they choose, no matter what that choice is. And I'm quite sure that when it came down to it, Dad wouldn't have wanted any heroic measures to prolong his life. But believe me when I tell you this: When someone you love is most likely going to die, there is NOTHING -- and I repeat,
NOTHING -- you will not try to prolong their life, even if it's just for a little while. In Dad's case, the chemo the second doctor suggested, if it worked, would've given him no longer than a year. But it most likely would've allowed him to eat; at that point, the cancer was sitting on his throat muscles, and he was starving to death because he couldn't swallow. Whether he'd have gotten his mind back wasn't a done deal, but still, it was something. And, if the first treatment didn't help, I was perfectly willing to say "All right, we tried," but I felt we needed to give Dad that one last chance. And he thought so, too, because a few days before that first treatment, I asked him if he wanted to at least try, and if he didn't, I'd understand.
Of course, wracked with her own grief, Mother fought me for a week on the whole thing, worried about how she would pay for something that wasn't going to help and so on and so forth, and in the end she was right, because after that first chemo, he started slipping into a coma. So I wonder how it is that he told her he wished I won't do to her what I was doing to him if he didn't even know his own name ...
Oh, whatEVER. 
