This is a trigger warning: 'night, Mother is about suicidal depression.
We meet Jessie and her mother deep in the American countryside. Jessie's father was a veteran, but he's been dead for sometime. Jessie comes home to help her aging mother, but one night during a routine evening conversation, Jessie asks her mother to bring her father's service revolver to Jessie, because Jessie intends to commit suicide with it. Jessie's mother, Thelma, struggles to understand what she means, especially since Thelma gets by in life with blind optimism. She struggles to have serious conversations, much preferring light-hearted chats.
But over the course of the evening, Thelma begins to get intimations for what her daughter is describing. As an epileptic, Jessie is unemployable. Without family or career (her stale and meaningless marriage ended in divorce), Jessie is left with no way to make meaning for herself. The effect is that she is susceptible to a never-ending sense of dread and deep existential angst, so severe, she views suicide as the only respite.
Jessie begins cleaning up around the house, and she makes a to-do list for her mother to help her through the steps necessary to see that Jessie's body gets where it needs to go, basically ensuring that her mother will not get lost in the complicated process of funeral planning.
In the end of the story, Thelma is left alone. Jessie walks into her bedroom, locks the door, and commits suicide, leaving her horrified mother in permanent, absolute agony.
