Being the good little student of dramatic structure that I am, I will not introduce you to our heroine by immediately inundating you with every detail of backstory you will possibly need, but will provide only what is necessary and allow the rest to unfold naturally as we go.
Ila Jean is dying. Or so we’ve been told. From what, no one is exactly sure. She was recently hospitalized for heart failure, which she has had but kept under control, for the most part, for years, and for pneumonia. Yet something happened to her during that month plus she was in the hospital. Perhaps it was the lack of oxygen to her brain—her oxygenation level plummeted into the sixty percentile range—but the woman who had been relatively independent a month and a half before, now isn’t. She was able to relearn to use her walker again, which she has used for years due to a stroke she had many years ago. But she is physically much weaker, and her cognitive abilities have left her unable to live alone. That’s where I come in.
So after over a month of hospitalization with no idea about why she was so ill but many theories, her doctor released her, putting her into hospice care. Which meant, officially, she was dying. And, officially, her terminal diagnosis is heart failure, though he put forth several other possibilities, including leukemia, which was the one that stuck in her head and consequently is the one she is convinced she is dying of, though we have little to support that. He, of course, wanted to do tests, but she, wanting nothing more than to just go home, refused. So he sent her home, and that’s where we stand. To make a long story short.
We have no estimation of how much time she has left. We have no idea of how she will go, or what will happen when it is her time to go. This is the thing that keeps her up at night. This is the thing that makes her sob at the drop of a hat. This is the thing for which I have no other words of comfort other than, “We will make you as comfortable as possible when it happens.” It is the not knowing.
The Life and Death of Ila Jean Brown 