There was a moment, four days before my mom passed, that brought these concepts into sharp focus for me. It was a Wednesday morning around 8:15am.
She hadn’t spoken in several days. She had stopped being able to swallow the day before. We didn’t know if she had any conscious awareness.
My sister was wiping her mouth and, as always, explaining what she was doing.
“I’m going to wipe the right side of your mouth and chin because you have some liquid on there. OK, I hope that feels better?”
My mom whispered, “Yes.”
My sister was stunned. “Did you just say yes? Because it feels better?”
“Yes,” my mom said again.
This small moment felt enormous.
Because our mother was suddenly back. And because it confirmed something we had been operating from intuitively: Even when someone cannot consent, they are still having an experience. They may still register comfort or discomfort. They may still feel the difference between being handled and being cared for.
On this Wednesday, my mom had multiple bursts of what’s called terminal lucidity, a brief return of clarity near the end of life. At one point that afternoon, when she was awake for about ten minutes, I asked her if she liked it when I climbed into bed next to her to spend time lying together. She gave a quiet “yes.”
The respect and kindness my sister and I, along with our favorite night aides, brought to her—our nuanced and communicative care, and our dedication to staying emotionally connected to her—mattered. We got the gift of knowing this was true through the final gift of her conscious presence.
This has added nuance to how I think about consent, and how we talk about it more broadly.
We tend to frame it as a clear yes or no, present or absent. It includes whether someone agrees, of course. But in reality, it is shaped by power, presence, and care:
Power: who has it and how it’s used.
Presence: whether the person with more power is paying attention to the other’s experience.
Care: whether the other’s humanity matters as much as our own.
We have built a cultural understanding of consent that focuses heavily on permission, and not enough on relationship. But a core aspect of consent is our willingness to see the humanity in every other human and recognize that they are not us, but they matter as much as we do.
Desire can be shaped by status, access, or validation. But can we stay connected to another person’s humanity when we want something from them? Without that, consent can be present on paper but disconnected in practice.
Caring for my mom gave me a lived experience of what it means to hold power carefully.
That experience now lives in me when I see cases like Epstein’s, and also the excuses used by the men who raped Gisèle Pelicot in France (if you’re not familiar with this horrifying case, here’s more information).
If we want a more meaningful, educational, and protective understanding of consent, we need to expand the conversation. The clearest difference I can articulate now is between those who include the other person when organizing their choices, and those who organize their choices only around their own needs. And too often, the bodies and lived experiences of women are treated as secondary in that equation.
What my mother showed me in her final days is that regardless of whether someone can verbally consent or not, we are still responsible for how we hold power over another person’s experience.
And how we hold that power reveals who we are.
~Dr. Jenn Gunsaullus — Sociologist, Intimacy Speaker, Relationship Coach, Author
