My Mother Dying

Do we ever really know who our parents are?

When Hillary Johnson learned that her mother had terminal cancer, she left New York City and returned to Minneapolis to care for her mother in her final years. While coping with the practical and emotional difficulties such a situation would cause any daughter, she slowly discovered what she had failed to see in the two decades since she'd left home for college and later career: her mother's identity as a woman, independent of the role of mother or wife.

In vivid snapshots of memory Johnson recalls her intense and sometimes troubled relationship with her irrepressible parent, Ruth Jones, who married at eighteen, had two young children by the time she was twenty-one and a few years later moved to Paris with her young children in search of a more fulfilling life. "Gone to Paris, took the kids," read the note she left her husband.

MY MOHER DYING is a beautifully written and emotionally compelling account of how two woman get to look beyond the role of mother and daughter and see two complex individuals who are given a final chance to truly know one another under the pressure of impending death.