I watch a lot of CSI-type shows on television, with murders and imagine finding a relative/parent/sibling killed suddenly like that in horrible circumstances and then imagine what it must feel like one's self to die horribly. One thing I've gradually come to realize is that everyone dies, can't do anything about that and "how" you die only matters to the people left behind and we don't get to ask the person who died their opinion.

My stepmother got more and more senile until "she" wasn't there anymore. At one point she fell in the night trying to get to her bathroom in the assisted living center and lay there unconscious and with a broken shoulder for a couple hours. They couldn't set her shoulder because her bones were like swiss cheese and wouldn't have just crumbled so her shoulder was left to "mend" the way it was broken. She didn't seem to know/"mind" but it probably "should" have been painful. It seemed kind of like with pain in other animals; things are painful for other animals but they don't think about or analyze it, it's "clean" for them, isn't aggrevated by emotion, their body throws in its pain killers and "dulls" the senses. It's usually not "painful" to die as an animal, they're "out of it." My stepmother got so she couldn't respond to us at all, she had some days that were better than others but eventually she just "wound down" and died. It was very painful to watch.

I think that is the key. I'm 56 now and can look back and see that some things that use to worry me, just don't anymore. I suspect that when I'm 86 (my aunt, is 85 and just called me a couple nights ago from across the country) I'll have different worries from what I have now. No one is judging you besides yourself and only you have the power to stop that. I remember when my father was in the hospital dying for a month in another state, my stepmother with him the whole time and eventually two of my three brothers and I showed up at the hospital worrying about what the people at the hospital must think that we left these elderly people alone at the hospital and didn't come visit. "Should" is not a good way to run one's life. Whether it's coming from our ideas of what other people are thinking or from our own need to think of ourselves as a "good" daughter or whatever, it's never positive or very useful?

But I hang on to how I would "feel" dying/being dead and equate it to after my appendix burst and I was waiting to be operated on for 8 hours. What if I'd never awaken from the operation? I did have breathing problems they were concerned about. But I wasn't "blaming" anyone for anything. I was wishing someone could make the pain stop. I'm sure if I had died my husband might have kicked himself for not taking me to the hospital earlier? We were out-of-state when my appedicitus started; my father-in-law had just died and my husband was executor and I had gone to help support him in that task. I bet if I'd died he would have thought/wished I hadn't been exposed to the stress? Hadn't had to move/travel so much? But what would I have felt? I would have been dead and going on with whatever comes after death.

Give yourself a break; your mother isn't "along" anymore, there was nothing you could have done to prevent her death, maybe you could have made her momentarily "happier" by visiting/calling/caring for her in some way but even if they didn't tell her she would probably have been scared if that was her "bent". But when you're "out" of it and sick, etc. emotions like "scared" have a hard time getting in. I had never been in the hospital before, was/am afraid of hospitals (am more so now) but there was no fear at all during my appendicitis attack, operation, and hospital stay. There's a whole lot of anticipatory fear but I now realize that when something is "happening" there's not much room other than dealing with what it is. That's what adrenaline does for one. But whether your mother was scared or not, there was nothing you could have done; her fear was hers! Being in the hospital or in a care situation, there are so many other people in the equation besides ourselves and our loved ones. I had frightening things happen in the hospital the week I was there several months after they botched my appendectomy, and there were those people and activities frightening me and those that comforted me but my husband was only there evenings during visiting hours. That's all part of my life and not something someone else can get in there and live for me. Your mother's life was about your mother, not your thoughts/feelings only your life is about you.