Control can kill you. If I ever doubted that, the last few days have made me a true believer.

I come from a line of women who like being in control. Actually, they insist upon it. They have been mislabeled as rigid and bitchy or, by the more diplomatic among us, uncompromising and strong. The truth, however, is that they are ruled by fear – fear of being hurt, being abandoned, being killed, being fooled – bundled up into an overriding need to control their environment and their place in it to ensure their emotional, physical and mental safety (perceived or real). It’s a false sense of security, of course, but only those outside the bubble are aware of the inherent danger in attempting to place rules on this thing called life.

Life. That’s what I’m talking about. It is entirely unpredictable. Ultimately uncontrollable. And it is my experience that the more someone ignores that truth, the more unmanageable life becomes. Have you made a similar observation?

My mother suffered a heart attack a few days ago, followed by emergency double bypass surgery to route blood flow past the 80% blocked arteries that were slowly killing her. She’ll be 67 in May.

And suddenly, just like that, her unmanaged diabetes, with symptomatic sky-rocketing blood sugars, is no longer something we can leave to her to handle. Rolling our eyes at the absurdity of her claims that she’s doing something about it, claims her family has heard for probably 40 years, is no longer responsible. So I’m now having to attempt the infuriating and frustrating conversations that anyone dealing with an unrecovered and unrepentant addict has. Because a person with unmanaged diabetes is just like a boozing alcoholic. Vodka and truffles are both ultimately sugar.

Sugar may very well be evil. The ultimate temptation (for those religiously inclined). It can morph you into the very devil, and not in any hot and sexy way.

But my mother has decided that she knows better than the multitude of doctors and family members telling her how ugly and protracted her death is going to be, and how moot this surgery will have been, if she doesn’t get her shit together.

Yes, I’m angry.

But at least I know I have no control – over whether she’ll finally start listening to someone other than herself and loosen her death grip on her life, over when and how death comes knocking on the door of any of my loved ones, over how people – known and unknown – perceive my reactions to this current drama and other life events… or over whether I’ll take advantage of her ignored wake-up call to begin correctly managing my own recently-diagnosed diabetes.

I am, after all, my mother’s daughter.

I just intend to learn more from her mistakes than she has learned from the previous generation’s.

And hope that she surprises me.

But control? I have no further craving for that.