NONFICTION - Feb. 23, 1992

THE LIFE AND DEATH OF MY MOTHER by Allen Wheelis (W. W. Norton: $17.95; 128 pp.). “And so it stays just on the edge of vision,” wrote Philip Larkin, “A small unfocused blur, a standing chill / That slows each impulse down to indecision. / Most things may never happen: this one will.” In these pages, Bay Area psychoanalyst Allen Wheelis tries to bring this “blur”--Larkin’s word for our concept of death--into focus. His technique largely involves the use of metaphors. “I have switched off the light,” he announces while sitting by his ailing mother’s bedside, letting us know that he has given up the fight against her mortality. The technique sometimes becomes an end in itself, involving Wheelis in a diverting literary exercise rather than forcing him to probe painful feelings. But mostly it has allowed him to craft a courageous alternative to the standard self-help fare preaching “acceptance.” Pointing out that his mother didn’t experience the Epiphany which we assume accompanies life’s last stage, Wheelis insists that “What we deny is not death but the awareness that, before we die, nothing is going to happen. That big, vague thing, that redemptive fulfillment, is an illusion, a beckoning bribe to keep us loyal. A symphony has a climax, a poem builds to a burst of meaning, but we are unfinished business.”