The daily digest of Twin Cities culture | Secrets of the City

My mother took me on a wild, unforgettable ride the morning she died. Drugged and nearly comatose for about twenty-four hours, she suddenly started breathing heavily, opened her dull, mucus-covered eyes, and began writhing her shoulders off the bed. I was holding her hand, and she gripped me so hard that her bones stabbed painfully into my palm. This intense, disquieting resistance lasted between five and ten minutes, and then Jeanne Northridge Robson was dead from cancer at age fifty-nine.