I'm alone and probably the best place to be on this rainy, reject day that I didn't want to wake and be conscious. Everything is bleak. I let the woodstove burn down last night and my furnace is dead. Maine refuses to give way to spring.

The one day I need sun to give me hope in life the weather will not cooperate. I should go to the gym or to my office. Maybe I should book a flight to Florida. My heart hurts. My head hurts.

For years, I watched my mother leave me. I have been betrayed by my mother in so many ways, subtle and not so subtle in my face. My mother has lived a sad life. I know I have already forgiven her and now I am profoundly sad for her.

She has suffered greatly. I want her to die. I don't want her to die. I want her to stop severely hurting mentally and physically. My mother has been a hypochondriac who took to her bed when I was still in grade school. She spent so many years preoccupied with pills and operations that imagined ills gave way to real illness and encroaching death.

Unfortunately, now death is only hovering and encroaching in the most excruciating and prolonged painful way. Sickness and pain have been my mother's constant companions for more years than I want to think about right now in this dark room.

For years, she wanted to leave. She wanted to escape but instead she has languished away in an angry and consuming misery that has attracted disease and death. She has suffered for her inertia and lack of resolve. Who can judge another life or a life that has had too much pay back for petty cruelty and spite?

Maybe my mother should not have been a mother. Maybe my mother's ability to love atrophied even faster than her body. Maybe my mother should have made better choices and acted instead of laying her body down to die way before its time.

Now my mother's body has been rotting for years and crippled by severe rheumatoid arthritis. My mother became a prisoner of her body. Her body betrayed her despite her preoccupation in taking it to many doctors with expertise in the ways of attentive procedures, operations and pills. Even though my mother's body has been a source of entrapment and pain, she has persisted and continued to exist.

Her body continues to betray her. She had a stroke a month ago. Although her doctors implanted a pacemaker, her tired, worn out heart refused to march to the beat set. Her stomach no longer wants food. Her spine breaks. Her body bruises to the touch.

Today, the doctors are amputating my mother's leg. How much more can her body endure? What will be the end of  this sad day?