Earthlings and deathbound, sooner or later we find ourselves on a deathwatch. You're a son, or a mother to one; or a daughter, with a particular relationship to both parents. Perhaps you're a parent. And if an old enough parent, maybe, blessedly, you are a grandparent. Has your mother died? Then you can resonate with a descriptive-reflective tale about the portentous event. If she's still living, one question remains: who will die first. If she should go first and you remain, how do you imagine it will transpire? However it might happen, it will tumble the balance within your entire family. It will provoke a crisis within and between family members.

On a deathwatch, one's entire network of relationships jostles and collides. How your family bonds tumble overlap crisscross dovetail--or splinter and divide--constitutes your story. It is a truism in the everyday world that weddings and funerals bring out the best and the worst in families. Scientific-psychological understanding about dying and death can foster the optimal. Stated somewhat differently, what we can see in retrospect concerning Deathwatch-behavior of the family, that comportment we can anticipate and influence. Is it not possible to imagine the contexts of Death's visit, and thereby promote optimal ways to negotiate it?

Death is Life's one inevitable crisis. The fact of Death is definite; the When of Death is indefinite. How capture the moment with a psychological-scientific grasp? How gain existentially practical knowledge?

My method of access is a Kierkegaardian-Nietzschean inspired existential hermeneutics, one that yields a uniquely passionately personal narrative and also reflectively touches the general core of the phenomenon.

This study aims to evoke a perspective of how (1) to help the family members to celebrate even as the suffer Mom's dying and death; (2) to help them to end the leave-taking ceremonies with the satisfaction of having given Mom a 'good'; good-bye; (3) to spark the quiet thrill of knowing that she did not die a meaningless death