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When your parent is dying, R.M. Vaughan writes, you tend to focus on smaller things, like the colour of the hospital walls.Kevin Van Paassen/The Globe and Mail

The following is the second instalment in a five-part, first-person series about what to expect when a parent is dying.

A hospital is where people go to be sick. Home is where people go to get better. If, like my late mother was, your dying parent is housed in the palliative ward of a hospital, there's a very simple reason why: She or he is never going to go home.

And so, this week's lesson: The hospital where your parent will die will be ugly, and you'll notice, and it's okay to be offended by the banality.

It is in a hospital's institutional nature to be, well, institutional, flat, uninspiring, even crass. You can't stop your parent from dying, you're raw as a fresh cut, and to add to the feeling of powerlessness, you do not get to redecorate the ugly rooms.

You know the decor of the hospital is meaningless, but your ability to process all this roiling emotion has shut down, so you fixate on the small stuff.

My mother was moved to a palliative ward almost immediately after her admission to her local hospital. It was not much of a jump, logically – she had had cancer for nearly two years and was in her late 80s.

By the time I arrived on the scene a week later, she already had "her room" and "her blanket" and "her nurses." The care was beyond simple attentiveness, it was something beautiful to watch.

The nurses treated my mother, and all their other patients, like family. I was surprised by this, as my own experiences with hospitals was rather the opposite – I always felt I was a burden. My mother felt like a minor royal staying at a top-drawer hotel, which, perversely, I found utterly baffling.

I know this sounds petty, like an effete concern, but I am an effete person. I see the world as a series of objects and vistas placed before me, some gorgeous, most not. I write about art for a living.

I defaulted to my training and plied the one skill set I had left at the time. And that hospital was one ugly heap. If you are going to watch someone you love die over a prolonged period, visiting the same building and same room repeatedly, is it too much to ask that the building and the room not be ghastly to behold? There's a reason more enlightened prisons paint the walls in soothing colours. Human brains respond to visual stimuli, good and bad.

In my mother's case, the palliative ward was done up in dusty robin's-egg blue highlighted with fake dark wood tones and bands of dated floral wallpaper.

None of the visitors' furniture corresponded with the rooms, and the public spaces were clotted with images of Jesus and angels, augmented with more angel figurines.

The point is that when your parent is dying in a hospital, you have to give up a level of control you would absolutely not give up in your regular life – and it hits you first at the hospital.

Because you cannot process the fact that you have arrived at this building and walked into this room to begin the process of saying goodbye to your mother or father, your brain shifts direction and lasers in on something you could easily correct.

So, if you are technically adept, you'll try to reset the television remote or fuss with the off-balance reclining chair. If you're a foodie, you'll glare at the meatloaf. If you're a creative type, you won't be able to stop staring at the too-familiar, sun-faded Impressionist posters. Raging against my mother's imminent death, I hatched a toss-one-Jesus-per-day-down-the-laundry-chute plan (never enacted).

Hospitals are reactive spaces. You go to a hospital because something is wrong, in reaction to a problem. Forgive yourself when you react to the hospital itself – how it smells, how it looks, how it sounds. You will want to flee. Any sane person would.

And so, a second, terrible lesson: It's okay if you don't go to the hospital every day. You're not being selfish; nor are your priorities out of place.

You, after all, have to survive despite the fact that your parent cannot. If "I can't stand the hum of the fluorescent tubes" is all you can say when you are asked to visit the hospital for the fourth day in a row, say it, and know that your sensitivities are not invalid.

They are the opposite; they are part of who you are. Besides, you know and anybody listening knows what you really mean is: "I am heartbroken that my parent is dying." Emotions will play out, one way or another.

I don't know how my brother did it, but he walked into that dead mall-like building and that low-rent-motel-like room every single day, even well after she had slipped into a near-coma and stopped seeing or hearing him.

He seemed oblivious to his surroundings, and puzzled (okay, annoyed) by my endless bitchy commentary. "Who cares?" his face said every time I cracked wise about the art.

I noticed, however, that my brother was preoccupied with the parking problems at the hospital – because he's a car person who loves to drive.

My brother's brain turned its problem-solving function, a function wholly depleted of value or power in the case of our mother's dying, toward figuring out how best to beat the chronic parking problem.

Treat the hospital (but never the harried, underpaid workers) like a screen on which you can project all your ill-tempered thoughts, reactions you are having to the real trouble at hand but that you don't have a voice for yet.

Your critical faculties are of no use otherwise, and won't save anybody's life, but you can't turn them off either. Take ownership of your inner difficult customer.

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