My grief for my mother sprawls in many directions. My smart, vibrant, warm, plucky mother spent three agonizing years stooped and gasping for breath over the handles of a walker, her body ravaged and withered by emphysema. It was terrible. I could try for 10 years and not come close to describing how heartbreaking it felt to watch her push through each day.

What was—and is—all the more unbearable is that her struggle was much, much worse than it had to be. Her marriage was always a bad bargain; it proved truly ruinous when she got sick. As the spouse of a woman suffering from both advanced emphysema and encroaching Alzheimer’s, my father was something like a perfect storm: selfish, inept, resentful, and increasingly impaired by depression and a paranoia-laced dementia. And thus the massive slow-motion train wreck I got in the habit of calling The Big Mess With Mom; see also Back Story. Train wreck and hostage drama: My mother enduring needless hardship and decline in thrall to a profoundly dysfunctional man determined only that she should continue getting dinner on the table at 5.

I failed to spare my mother this. I did try. And try, and try. It drained me; it cost me. It required skills I didn’t have. It revived old traumas and stirred old guilts. It plundered my time and ruined my sleep. It drew oceans of tears. It drove me to despair. But still I failed. I tried to save her and I couldn’t, and I am consumed with guilt: I should have tried harder. I should have done more.