My toddler is scurrying between wheelchairs in a convalescence hospital, chasing oversized party balloons. For the people in the wheelchairs, hitting balloons back and forth is supposed to be physical therapy, but few people seem interested, much less fully coherent.

His grandmother, my mother-in-law, is in a circle of wheelchairs, one of the few people on this day intent on hitting the balloons. My 2-year-old scampers over to her chair to wave and then gets distracted by a balloon skittering across the institutional linoleum. He provides a rare spark of life in a place where death makes frequent house calls.

My wife quietly interrupts the scene and wheels her mother out of the room, the 2-year-old dutifully in tow. There is work to be done. My mother-in-law wants to plan her own funeral.

After years of health problems, her body is shutting down and her mind, once quick with facts and details, is often confused. Doctors have admitted her into a hospice program and say death will visit soon.

Planning her funeral is a gift for a woman who kept lists of lists and loved to organize and plan parties. She greets me with a stack of yellow pads, a folder from a funeral home, and a newly acquired Gideon’s Bible. The yellow pads contain a guest list and ideas for the funeral. But the hand that once wrote things out in immaculate cursive now scrawls out names and ideas.

She wants Bible verses that contain some of the themes she would like stressed at the funeral: love, peace, forgiveness, family, and friends. She doesn’t know where to look, so I offer some ideas. We talk and plan until it becomes apparent we are done for the day. I had asked what she had just written – she doesn’t know.

We have not talked about the funeral since then. What energy she has now diminishes quickly. The facts and figures get badly jumbled. Her work has turned from funeral planning into fiction, as dreams and hallucinations have replaced reality. There is a conspiracy that has consumed her and she claims to have been taken hostage by imaginary captors.

Her body and mind continue to deteriorate. The family, stressed on all sides, remains. My father-in-law, wife, and children visit several times a day and cater to her every need. Pepsi for the diabetic? At this point, no problem.

Dylan Thomas’ line “Do not go gentle into that good night” works so much better on paper than in reality, as the woman the family has known seems to fade away, existing only in parts and pieces. That may be nowhere more evident than in her funeral planning. She became angry recently because, as she explained it, she threw a great funeral party and none of her guests came.

Some day too soon people will come to a funeral. It will be the last great party she planned. They will remember her life and enjoy who she was but she will not be present. She will have find peace as she goes into that good night.