At a pitch meeting last year, an editor here proposed doing a story about the complicated experience of caring for an aging parent whom you don’t have a great relationship with — and whom maybe you don’t like all that much. We agreed it was a rich topic, one that raised questions about forgiveness and power and filial duty, but weren’t sure how to assign it. Until, many months later, a draft of this breathtaking essay appeared in a few of our inboxes. It touched on many of the themes we’d discussed but cast them in even more extreme terms. In it, Evelyn Jouvenet writes about her mother, who had been a cruel, imperious, and frightening presence throughout her daughters’ lives, and who, at age 74, announced that she planned to go to Switzerland for an assisted suicide. The mother was healthy, but “tired of life” and ready to end her own. “I hoped a deadline might compel her to give me the thing I’d been seeking for years,” Jouvenet writes, “some accounting of who she was as a parent, some sign that she had thought about all the nicks and bangs she had given my sister and me.” |
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