A good friend’s mother died early this morning. Because she had been in hospice care for two days, her death was not unexpected. But because she had been confined to a nursing home for nearly five years, it was long anticipated. She had had a serious stroke, and it had nearly killed her, but she rallied. She rallied, but she did not recover. Bedridden, she passed the following years in a slow detachment from life; her last flickers of interest were prompted by movies on TCM.

To those of us who followed the ordeal, which, while not exactly uneventful, was largely incident-free, this was “no kind of life.” We were thinking of ourselves — we’re not so young any more. We were helplessly horrified by the prospect, made so vivid by our friend’s mother, of finding ourselves stuck in useless bodies that would not give up while draining our loved ones’ patience and pocketbooks. My friend devoted the better half of every Tuesday, year after year, to paying a visit to his mother’s bedside, taking a commuter train out and back, and walking to and from the station in all weathers. It was not uncommon for her to disregard his presence. She had difficulty swallowing; she had to be lifted out of her bed by a hoist. It was worse, we who were approaching the loss of our own faculties agreed, than no kind of life. And it seemed to go on forever.

Toward the end of Sara Davidson’s memoir of Joan Didion, Joan: Forty Years of Life, Loss, and Friendship, there appears a nugget of great wisdom. The conversation between the author and her subject touched on the death of Didion’s daughter, Quintana Roo.

I said I’d always believed I wouldn’t want to go on if one of my children died.

“Well, we don’t imagine we can tolerate a lot of things, until they happen.”

We often claim, my older friends and I, that, if and when faced with a future of debilitation such as that endured by my friend’s mother, we would commit suicide. We never use this word, however, and I find that telling. We say that we would “do something” — at the most, “take a pill.” And this make us feel better in the moment, now, when life is still good (or good enough) and we can, for the most part, take of ourselves and do what we want to do. We are not very clear about what it is that we “would do,” and we’re not always sure that we have the necessary “pill.” But since we’re not actually planning anything, that’s okay. We’re just warding off an unpleasant possibility. Didion reminds us that life is a series of discrete present moments, none of them bound by feelings of the past, and also that the “we” who make these confident but vague predictions about dealing with a loss in the quality of life are not in fact speaking for the whole of ourselves, the organic totality to which our talking heads are decorative appendages. In the moment, that totality, the whole of us, is probably — not definitely, perhaps, but very likely — going to choose life, regardless of the circumstances.

Now that my good friend’s mother has died, I feel a plain sorrow. The idea of her death as some kind of release, the idea that we have been mourning her passing for years in advance — these notions are as offensively unseemly as I thought they were when I was tempted by them. If there has been any release, it is I who have been freed, freed to mourn my good friend’s mother.