23 Apr 2025

Death watch

Ana Marie Cox on death and salvation

Today: Ana Marie Cox, columnist at The New Republic and MSNBC and co-host of the new Past Due Podcast.

Issue No. 305

Inheritance

by Ana Marie Cox

I’ve known since she died that the horror of my mother’s death was a gift. The images of my beautiful mother with her hands drawn up into claws, her lips pale and unrouged, the light out in her eyes, the soft and hesitant way she looked around the room, everything newly unfamiliar. Those memories helped keep me sober for many years.

I didn’t want to die like that.

She died ugly and she died owning three houses and a Rolex watch. I only thought of that last week.

Usually, I remember that she died in a diaper, her hair stringy and knotted, eyes unfocused. She was unable to brush her teeth, unable to write her name, unable to recognize me.

She died April 23, 2012, of complications due to cirrhosis—exactly a month and a year after my own last drink. Her death was gruesome, humiliating, tragic, and completely avoidable. The doctor who gave us her diagnosis showed us images on a big screen TV: This is a healthy liver; this is a liver with some scarring; this is a liver with more scarring and this is your liver, Mrs. Van Winkle.

“The good news,” he said, “is that liver disease is very treatable. We have fantastic drugs; there are transplants. You could have a nearly normal lifespan.”

All those possible years slammed into the pause after that sentence, then floated away as he finished: “But the typical patient with your level of liver damage dies in a year or two. They just can’t stop drinking.”