Legacy MattersSiobhan Kilfeather was a beautiful professor of English and Irish Literature at Queen's University, Belfast and happily married with two very young children when she was diagnosed with the deadly skin cancer melanoma. Nine months later, x-rays showed that the cancer had reached her lungs.
She decided to go on a pilgrimage to Lourdes and her mother-in-law jumped at the chance to go with her.
Siobhán's "miracle" happened one bitterly cold day in the French Pyrenees in February 2000. There, my stepson's beautiful young wife threw herself at the statue of Mary in the shrine at the holy town of Lourdes.There, my stepson's beautiful young wife threw herself at the statue of Mary in the shrine at the holy town of Lourdes.
With hands outstretched and eyes full of fire, she beseeched the statue. "Holy Mary," she prayed aloud, "you know better than anyone on earth the love a mother has for her children. Surely you won't deprive my babies of their mother. "They need me. I beg you; find it in your heart to give me more time. Let me see them grow up a bit first - then I'll be ready."
Siobhán was begging not for survival, but merely time to see her children grow to an age where they would know and remember her. Constance and Oscar, then aged four and two, and back home in England, were too young to know about the cancer which was already ravaging their mother's body.
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Although she was tired after our flight from London, by evening Siobhán declared she was well enough to walk in a candlelight procession with thousands of other pilgrims celebrating the Feast of Our Lady. Before her illness Siobhán had been a vibrant, energetic young woman. Now she walked painfully slowly and her breathing was laboured.
She took my arm as we struggled to keep up with the procession. Suddenly she turned to me and with complete conviction declared: "I felt a shift inside my body today. I believe the cancer has left me. Mary has answered my prayer. She says I'm to be allowed more time with my children."
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Siobhán certainly never doubted that she had been spared by the grace of God. She never ceased giving grateful thanks for her reprieve and returned to the faith of her childhood with a renewed fervour.
When you have been so close and stared death in the face, life becomes more precious than ever. >Siobhán set about completing all the things she thought would be denied to her for ever.
Her mother-in-law Ellen Jameson tells her story in a soon-to-be published book previewed in the Daily Mail,
Married 58 years, they die 90 minutes apart of different causes in the same hospital .
"I'm fully convinced my dad called my mom and said, 'Let's go.'"
Even death couldn't keep this couple apart
A doctor who works at Columbia Presbyterian scammed his 92-year-old mother out of nearly $1 million.
Minnie Motz, the mother who worked her whole life as a librarian never thought her Jewish doctor son would leave her virtually penniless and on the brink of eviction.
Son-Burned
Dr. Robin Motz, an internist took control of his mother's finances in 2003 because she was failing physically.
In 2004, when her husband, Lloyd Motz, died, Robin Motz moved his mother's investments from her Oppenheimer account to a Merrill Lynch account in his name, prosecutors said. He liquidated the investments, which had been in tax-free municipal bonds, and began writing checks to cover his credit-card bills, the Manhattan DA's Office charged.
He's now under indictment and faces 15 years in jail.
A woman with a West-Indian accent who picked up the phone at Minnie Motz's apartment would only say, "How would you feel? That's exactly how she feels!"
Slate is having a memoir week about people who have written and published memoirs. They asked a group of memoir writers whether or not they alerted family members and friends that they were writing about them.
Usually published memoirs incorporate imaginative renderings to flesh out characters and conversations, so how family and friends reacted becomes quite interesting. Those of you who are beginning to write your own memoir, not for publication, but for yourself and your family, will want to take a look.
Daneille Trussoni wrote a memoir about her relationship with her father who was a tunnel rat in Vietnam while she was living in Sofia, Bulgaria, after extensive research but had few conversations with family members or her father after he developed throat cancer
Sean Wilsey wrote
The way most memoirists have handled still-living people has been to outlive them and then publish. Or publish, then flee.
Yet Wilsey interviewed just about everyone he could think of to write about his mother who when she read the manuscript felt betrayed but was big enough to say
Sean, it's such an accurate portrait of so many people that I know that I've had to conclude it must be an accurate portrait of me, too. And so I'm really going to have to take a look at the fact that I come across that way."
His stepmother hired a lawyer and threatened to sue.
John Dickerson wrote about his mother Nancy Dickerson
The book I wanted to write was about a journey from an angry kid to the adult who came to love this amazing woman.
Watching old film he found himself
rooting for her as if she were the child and I the parent.
When Frank McCourt wrote Angela's Ashes
I was denounced from hill, pulpit, and barstool. Certain citizens claimed I had disgraced the fair name of the city of Limerick, that I had attacked the church, that I had despoiled my mother's name, and that if I returned to Limerick, I would surely be found hanging from a lamppost.
A new movie starring Sally Field and Ben Chaplin called Two Weeks, now in limited release, tells the story about what happens to a family when the one person who holds it together can't hold on anymore.
Writer/Director Steve Stockman has a blog describing how he came to write the movie which was inspired by his own experience of being with his siblings as his mother lay dying. What he found at various screenings was people want to tell their stories.
After one screening in Seattle, I heard about the woman who didn't really know her brother until she spent his last 7 days by his bedside, when he was dying of aids. The woman whose sisters-in-law descended on her mother's house while she was dying and made off with the antiques. The man whose mother refused to talk to him about the fact that she was dying-but knew, and left him 15 pages of notes on how to live. Some funny stories, some sad, some with lessons, some horrifyingly pointless. But all of them very personal and fascinating.
At the Hamptons Film Festival last month, a woman in the audience said that she had never talked about what happened when her brother died, and she was amazed at how similar “Two Weeks” was to what happened to her. Others in the audience agreed.
It turns out that end of life is something that happens to everyone. And lots of people want to talk about it—but it’s such a private and scary subject, they think they’re the only ones.
It’s been great for me to find out that we’ve created a film about an experience common to many, many people. And it’s been great, I think, for people who’ve been through it to realize they’re not alone.
Andrea Peyser who was there called it a Wacky D-List Weepapoolsa and reports:
Anna Nicole Smith showed up for her funeral - in a church perched inside a shopping mall - with her coffin decked out in what looked like a giant, pink sequined pasty....
Anna's exit from this world was every bit as bloated, extravagant and needy - and angry - as her life. The onetime nude model and geezer's wife, who achieved her greatest celebrity mainly by dying, was shipped from this world not with a service, but an extravaganza.
And as with all spectacles, there was an animal act.
That came when Anna's companion, Howard K. Stern, took to the pulpit like a Doberman pinscher - condemning Anna's mother, the media, even the lawyers and Florida judge, in a speech so inappropriate, they'll talk about it around these parts for years. So much for the dignified family funeral.
Things kicked off with a vengeance at nearly 11 a.m., when some scary hired muscle men unfurled an actual red carpet onto the parking lot of the Mount Horeb Baptist Church, nicely located next to a convenience store.
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I've seen people sob at funerals. Maybe laugh. But the crowd who gathered under the blazing sun to watch this oddity cheered, jeered and made obscene gestures. And that was just outside. Inside, it was worse
Herzlinde Eissler didn't understand why her family didn't visit her in the hospital over Christmas. When she was discharged, she went home only to discover her family organizing her funeral.
Her son Leopold Eissler, 39, said he had gone to visit his mother shortly before Christmas only to be told she was dead and had then spent the festive period organising her funeral.
He said: "I'm not sure whether to be delighted because my mother is alive or furious that they could have made such a mistake at the hospital.
"At least it explains why they could not find the body when we wanted to pay our last respects.
"I could not believe it when she walked in through the front door and the whole family were all sitting around dressed in black and planning the funeral."
How low is this!
Thief Steals Video Dying Mother Made for Son
Diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer, Melanie Worthington was concerned that her 5-year-old son Theo might not remember her after she was gone.
"When Melanie found out she was sick, she wanted to use the camcorder to make tapes for her little boy," her mother Carla Worthington said. "So we taped her making cookies with him, playing up at the cabin, anything that he might need to look back on and see how they did things together."
A few weeks after she died, someone walked through an unlocked door in the Worthington home and stole virtually all of the video remembrances she recorded.
Police have no suspects in custody, and the family has no duplicates of the tapes.
"It was like someone had come out and taken her away from us a second time," said her sister Marnie.
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Carla Worthington, 61, said she and her husband, Phillip, 63, are both on disability, but managed to scratch up a reward of $200 for the return of the merchandise and the tapes.
"Maybe this is one way we can get them back," she said. "I guess I'm hoping for some kind of miracle."