My mother dying of cancer is a week that feels like one long day, alternating between light and despair. This experience is strange and surreal. Yesterday she seemed so close to death. My face was covered in tears and I was whispering in her ear so many things, then eating lots of trash because in this situation, you get the ice cream, people coming in and out, nurses saying things you don’t want to hear, learning how to do more machines, morphine no more than 0.5 (maybe I should try a little myself), calls to relatives to say come now or maybe tomorrow instead or not at all because they are of no help. Then she wakes up looking like a baby and blinking her big eyes and it seems for an hour everything is going to be all right.