A few days before my mother died, her primary doctor asked to speak to me in the hall outside her hospital room.

I pushed myself out of the chair beside my mother's bed, where she lay unconscious and tethered to oxygen. Why not? The doctor couldn't possibly have more awful surprises. My mom already had lobbed the worst of those grenades — and weeks before her doctor had figured it out.

"I'm dying, and I know it," she'd told me two months earlier.

She had s ...

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