M  om asked me to "put an end to her misery" only twice; but she asked my sister dozens of times. Fully immobilized by a succession of strokes, she was daily roused by the kindest caretakers imaginable, dressed, fed, propped up in a wheelchair too small for her spreading frame, and wheeled into the living room of her apartment where she spent the day alternately staring at my ailing father or out a window. At first, when she could still speak--a mumble, really, as if she was working out the mechanics of her voice, which she was--she'd try to engage my father in conversation. But he, hard of hearing and facing his own precipitous decline,  would not, could not hear her and instead depended on the comforting noise of the television at a decibel level that clearly pained her. When either of us came to visit --and in my newly minted widow's grief I didn't get there often enough--she had almost forgotten how to talk and had lost interest in any subject save one: how she might hasten her end. One day she suggested my sister throw her off the patio; another time she muttered "arsenic' with a chuckle. The password in her final days to her heart's desire was captured in three letters: DNR -- "Do Not Resuscitate" .

 Dad had a liver ailment that should have killed him years earlier; Mom hadn't moved on her own in nearly five years. They used to bet on who would outlast the other, a sort of "til death do us part, but you go first" scenerio. They each possessed a formidable internal will, which is why Mom's talk of suicide was particularly wrenching.

In the end, Dad died first, following a heart attack. Within a month, we'd airlifted mom from Florida to a nursing home in New Jersey near my sister and me. She rallied briefly, but as the cold weather she hated approached, she began to whisper again, "I wish I could die." One day, I looked back at her and said, "You can." 

I couldn't give my mother what she wanted, a way to break out of  her mental and physical prison.  She could only demand that she not be kept artifically alive. And so she did.  As the temperature dropped, she grew weaker and refused hospitalization. Finally in hospice she was made comfortable, at last able to pass peacefully, while I held her hand and whispered, "You're good to go, Mom."

  my mother and me, late 2004