Laurie Kilmartin is a comedian. The above is a specimen of her standup. She is also a writer for Conan and the author of two books, Sh*tty Mom: The Parenting Guide for the Rest of Us and Dead People Suck. Regarding Sh*tty Mom, I assume it's autobiographical and that the title describes the contents. A year or two ago I happened to be in Magers and Quinn bookstore one afternoon when she was there to read from Dead People Suck. It's about her dad's final illness and the hospice experience she went through with him and the rest of her family as he was dying. I don't know how funny it is, but, judging from the selections she read that day, it's for sure funnier than it sounds, in a dark sort of way that appeals anyway to me.
As her Twitter followers know, Kilmartin has for the last couple of weeks been conducting an encore performance as her mother lies dying of Covid-19 in a hospital. The efforts of her and her sister to persuade the hospital to let them visit their mom at the ICU have been the subject of news reports in the LA area. For the most part, however, she monitors her mom over Facetime while live tweeting her last days. Does that sound inhuman? It's the opposite. Too tedious to paste in tweets so I'll just type a few of them:
Busy watching the Season 82 finale of "Mom"
Glad I only had two parents, I can't do this again
so. mom's heart rate is 30. that seems low!
My sister and I are both heartbroken that mom's last words to us were complaints about the nursing home and not about our appearance.
She is barely breathing but it would be great if she could awaken from all this and tell me to wash my robe.
GAH I tried to put my head on mom's heart and hit all the keys on the keyboard
Getting in our last 300 "I love yous"
When her mom died this morning, Kilmartin tweeted—
She died not at home, surrounded by people she'd never met #COVID
—and followed it up, a few minutes later, with:
In lieu of flowers, the family asks that you throw hot coffee in the face of anyone not wearing a mask.
Type "Laurie Kilmartin twitter" into Google if you want at least a hundred more "chapters" in this 21st-century art form.
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