Lifestyle

The Last Thing My Mother Wanted

By on • ( Leave a comment )
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.”

—Joy Shan, features editor, New York

The Last Thing My Mother Wanted Healthy at age 74, she decided there was nothing on earth still keeping her here, not even us.

Photo: Hugo Yu
Read the full story
Enjoying One Great Story?
Subscribe now for unlimited access to everything New York.

More From Today
On the Cut, Samhita Mukhopadhyay analyzes the fraught relationship between the body-positivity movement and our current moment of “miracle” weight-loss drugs. 
READ MORE »
To “celebrate” the release of the questionable new Amy Winehouse biopic, Back to Black, Rebecca Alter and Jason P. Frank rank recent music biopics from the best of the worst to the even worser.
READ MORE »
Kari Lake’s worst enemy is fellow Republican Stephen Richer, writes Casey Quackenbush, whose defamation lawsuit over Lake’s false claim that he stole the election could bankrupt her. 
READ MORE »
Don’t trust that “veneer tech” you saw on TikTok: For the Cut, Lindsay Gellman reports on the fake certification courses, and their horrifying results, that are popping up all over social media. 
READ MORE »
Curbed’s Adriane Quinlan uncovers how Drake’s $100 million Toronto mansion and Kendrick Lamar’s empire of pieds-à-terre and rentals somehow entered the rappers’ feud.
READ MORE »

Streamliner
Sign up for a weekly newsletter of TV and movie recommendations.
SIGN UP
unsubscribe  |  privacy notice  |  update preferences

 

This email was sent to kppgarv@mindspring.com. View this email in your browser.

 

Reach the right online audience with us
For advertising information on e-mail newsletters please contact AdOps@nymag.com
Vox Media, LLC
1701 Rhode Island Ave NW, Washington, DC 20036
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved.

Categories: Lifestyle

Leave a Reply