After about a week back in Maryland, it appears that my mother is doing better than we – or at least I – expected. She gets tired easily, but is generally strong. The living room has been converted into a makeshift hospital room, complete with hospital bed, oxygen tanks, charts on clipboards and bottles upon bottles of pills, but other than that, it feels much like a normal visit home. It’s not like she’s out of the woods or anything – she is still in hospice care – but her quality of life doesn’t seem significantly worse than it has been over the last couple of months.