Still Around

It has been rather hectic here but everyone here is still healthy and happy.  Maybe that last word is contentious--I am not so sure the matriarch is happy and I am not so sure I am.  My husband tells me I worry too much but I follow his mother around, wasting my time in reading omens in her behaviour.  She is changing.  Life is about change.  But I feel like I am trying to predict when she will go; I feel like there will be some indicator and I can tell my husband you should spend more time with your mother, she may die tonight.  Logically, that is just futile.  Worse, it sounds as though I want her to move on.  I don't.  I just wish she could get more out of life--Swiss Chalet is nice and everything but it shouldn't be the highlight of a very long life.  I read a short essay by Tony Jundt, an American historian, who has ALS.  His whole life is an intellectual experience; he doesn't want to die but wishes life wasn't so hard.  He's been told he's lucky to have such experiences of the mind, to have such a wonderful memory but, while he doesn't want to die, his physical experiences have been sheer torture.  I wonder about my mother-in-law.  Is it fair for me to measure my mother-in-law's life?  I know she wants something I just can never tell what it is.  Sometimes, I feel she wants approval, as if she is asking me permission to continue living; other times, I know she just wants to go for a drive.  I know it is not fair to compare her to Tony Jundt but I wonder how one decides if life is worth living, an examined life verses an active one?