Last rites: Katherine Anne Porter's story about a dying woman

Katherine Anne Porter's story The Jilting of Grandma Weatherill is a little more conventional than Theft, which I posted on yesterday, but just a little. It's even tighter in time, space, and scope - the whole story taking place in the course of one day, one of the final days in the life of the title character, and the story entirely from her POV, and what makes it memorable and effective is the way in which KAP captures the fluttering mind of this elderly, dying, sardonic lady: people move in and out of her consciousness, some present in the room with her, some memories from over the course of her life, some of the things she says (or hears) may actually be spoken/heard, others not, KAP is not definitive about this, which is great - it leaves us very much in the dying woman's mind. Interesting to compare stories of death and dying - Tolstoy being the master - but the death in this story is gradual, peaceful, seemingly painless, at least physically - but there is emotional torment - of which we catch glimpses: Grandma's bluntness toward the doctor and toward her daughter, Cornelia, who is caring for her and whom we hear say to the doctor "she was never like this," a plaint familiar to anyone who's tended to a dying relative. Most of all, we are with Grandma as she recalls various moments of and people in her life - most notably the jilting of the title: she was actually left at the altar by an early love, and to her dying day she cannot really get over the shame and humility and sorrow of such meanness. Yes, she had a good life, a good husband who'd died many years previously, good children - but there is something missing and untended in her last moments, so strange her urge to be able to tell the man who left her that yes, she did have a good life without him. Did she really, though?