[EDITORIAL NOTE: While I'm in Maine this week, several elderbloggers agreed to substitute for me. Today, Claude Covo-Farchi of Blogging in Paris writes of her mother’s last days, and of facing her own mortality. Please welcome her to Time Goes By and visit her blog too.]

Ronni Bennett has asked me to write a piece for Time Goes By as a guest blogger, which thrills me, but which I also find a bit frightening, considering English is not my mother tongue.

For a long time, I have been thinking about the way my mother died. Gitta lived some fifty years with Joseph, her husband, and for the last years of her husband's life, all her energies were turned towards taking care of him. Joseph had a heart condition and she did everything she could to keep him healthy. She behaved like a real Jewish mother to him.

So much so that sometimes, it even got on his nerves! When I visited, he suggested going for a walk with me, and in fact we would go to the café around the corner and talk over a cup of coffee.

When he died in 1982, Gitta felt totally useless and all the health problems that had been masked before his death started manifesting. She had been a heavy smoker all her life, and had only quit smoking in 1976. To Gitta, your body was like a car. If you were sick, you went to the doctor’s and told him where the pain was, and like a garage mechanic, he'd fix it. But emphyzema couldn't be fixed and although she ignored it while my father was alive, it started showing and growing after his death.

I visited several times a week and, weather permitting, we would go out for a walk. Her breath was so short that I had to carry a small stool along, and she would sit every five minutes to catch her breath. Soon, she needed oxygen, and we couldn't even do that.

I remember one time when I had to take her to hospital, which fortunately was across the street from where I then lived. She had to stay there for quite a while and started losing her bearings. Once, she told me how my sister-in-law had misplaced her plates –she thought she was still at home. One afternoon, she told me how she had seen German soldiers come and take a baby from the hospital during the night.

To hospital staff, her mind was perfectly all right, as some of the time, she made sense. Well, indeed she had not totally lost her mind, but she was lost in a place she didn't know.

Eventually, when she went back home, after a couple of weeks, she was back to her old self, at least mentally. But her strength was declining and eventually, she had to accept that she couldn't remain at home on her own.

This was really hard for her to accept. You see, Gitta had always been a very capable woman. Not submissive, not patient, not the sort of woman who could accept losing her independence easily.

Of course, writing about my mother's death brings to my mind the way I am going to grow older and die. It is difficult, almost impossible to imagine losing my independence. Since my husband's death, I have become quite a loner. I have a good many friends whose company I enjoy, but mostly, I do what I like when I like and have become a pretty independent woman.

And it's even more difficult to imagine feeling my body wane, my legs weaken and not carry me through long walks any more.

Through my experience of seeing Gitta or other members of my family who passed away, I feel that I should get my mind used to the idea that there will be a time in my life when I will need help. But I find it difficult to write about it. Or is it just hard to think about it?

When I started this piece, I had planned a short part about my mother and a longer part trying to reflect about the future. But somehow, my mind refuses to go there. I will cross those bridges when I come to them, no doubt, as I have crossed others, but it irks me to realise what a coward I am.