ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author suggests how a Levinasian-inspired, ethically-infused psychoanalytic outlook can significantly add to the psychological understanding of a parent dying, both from the perspective of the dying mother, and from the perspective of the adult son who helps tend to her. The author discusses how his elderly mother dealt with her approaching enfeeblement, illness, and death, and how this experience of witnessing her physical and mental deterioration affected him. The death of a mother or, for that matter, a father or surrogate parent, often cuts deeply into one's being in an unprecedented and unpredictable manner. Levinas views death as unfathomable and radically disruptive, as pointing towards a mindfulness of otherness, of the face-to-face, in other words, of love as responsibility for the Other. Death lies permanently beyond experience, is utterly unknowable.
