Did drawing my aunt on her deathbed rob me of the opportunity to engage with her one last time?

My aunt Marianne died on Saturday just hours after I left her and I am riddled with low sense of self-worth, because I didn’t wake her or hold her hand or play her favorite music. It’s not like I was completely ignorant. She had been sick for months and really, really sick for weeks. There was something that struck me about the feeling of the room and the look of her face. The clear oxygen mask on her mouth let vapors escape and they rose against the incoming light from the window, like motes of spiraling fairy dust, or echoes of the cigarette smoke that often, for years, crowned her head. Her hand clutched onto the remote for the bed controls, and I watched as it relaxed, slackened and hung limp off the side of the bed. Shouldn’t I have known? Instead I propped my sketch pad on my lap and leaned a favorite photo of her in a Santa hat, framed, on the window ledge, thinking that when she woke she would know that I had been there and she would recognize the season. Time in the ward seemed suspended and, though she had been there since March, she had missed out on summer and fall. Down stairs there was a celebration of decorated trees that we had often enjoyed, yet she was too weak and to unwieldy to put into a wheel chair. We would miss the spectacle this year.

On previous visits I had woken her when I found her sleeping and been told I had just interrupted the best dream in her life, or was responsible for the wracking pain that suddenly hit her and had her yelling for a nurse. Just the last visit I had asked her if it was better when she slept and she said, “unfortunately, yes”.

All this is to defend myself for not waking her on her last day on the planet. I did drawings of her instead. I didn’t wake her. Does that make me a bad person?