U.S. News & World Report: Ellen Goodman won the Pulitzer Prize for her thoughtful Boston Globe columns. Now retired from that job but busier than ever, Goodman publicly laments that she won no prizes for easing her mother through illness and very hard decisions about how to care for her during the final months of her life.
“The last thing my mom would have wanted was to force me into such bewildering, painful uncertainty about her life and death,” Goodman writes on the website of The Conversation Project, an effort she co-founded in 2010. “I realized only after her death how much easier it would have all been if I heard her voice in my ear as these decisions had to be made. If only we had talked about it. And so I never want to leave the people I love that uneasy and bewildered about my own wishes. It’s time for us to talk.”