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Mom died on Sunday, very early in the morning. There have been papers to sign; my sister and brother have of course handled lion's shares of the complex work involved – contacting relatives, banks and newspapers, filling out forms, cleaning out her room, etc.

I'm apologetic to say that I mostly feel a certain dim relief. It feels as though she hasn't been 'there' for about three years – not comatose, but it seemed that her memory, personality, her self pretty much disintegrated some time ago. My brother and sister discussed the details of how she was acting – she seemed more awake and responsive when my sister was there, for a while, and that is when I got to see her through a shaky Skype connection, about every two weeks.

So it's not as though she wasn't there at all: not without reactions, small near-smiles, changes in the eyes and facial muscles. But they seemed the reactions of an extremely young child, from very, very far away – it became confusing to decide who you were communicating with, or whether you were communicating at all. (And, of course, especially the past three or four months, whether she was recognizing my face and waving hand on a computer screen as an actual person, or if it was just blobs of color moving.)

All three of us, plus spouses and my brother-in-law, have been watching the same things happen, and obviously trying to figure out what they mean for us. Impossible to know, I suppose. And, of course, I wonder if it is insensitive of me to be so sure that she wasn't 'there' enough to matter – that any loss to her, or to us, happened some time ago, and this is just the end of a mildly sad coda to her life. (Only mildly sad because, fortunately, she was not anxious for long during her mental decline – this is the crucial difference between Alzheimer's and other kinds of dementia; because I do know that one of the worst experiences of my mother's life was taking care of her aunt when she had Alzheimer's, a really tortuous experience that went on for what seemed like a long time.)

It's hard to know. I suppose that having seen a lot of illness and death, and thought about it in a fairly introverted way, makes me assume I would understand what is going on with someone else – especially someone as important to me as my mother – when she's near the end, and also then when she's gone. But it does seem like the vast clouds of unknowing that surround mental disintegration and death are just as opaque as they ever were: not only are we unable to follow at the end, it's hard to feel that you are sharing any part of the experience.

Maybe what my sister did – sent out a collection of photographs of my mother at different points in her life, some of which I've seen, some of which were new to me – is the best way to connect: connecting of course to a younger woman in the midst of life, but someone one can at least intuitively understand.

In any case: I do have a sense of the parts of myself that come from my father and my mother – and there are surprisingly large parts of each. The combination of those parts darkens both of them a bit – I am sadder, more easily depressed than my father; and although I share my mother's passionately well-meaning anxiety that she was doing the right thing, taking care of her family in the best ways possible at all times, I do tend to lose forward impetus and a belief in action more easily than she did.

Perhaps the reality hasn't hit yet: after all, and this is unfortunately a familiar situation for me, living far away means that the verbal news of someone's death has a certain imagined or abstract quality.

But, given that my mother and I tended to be so close at some levels – sadly at levels full of anxiety: I felt that I was always one of her biggest worries – there is still the sense of the lighter-hearted, smiling Greek girl, the shy youngest of three who discovered she was beautiful in her late twenties, who had a passion for caring for people.

So perhaps my sister's collection of photographs is the best thing to do: to focus on that awareness of eighty-nine years of life....