Most of us hope death will come for us quietly, at the end of a long life, when we are at home, surrounded by family, and take us quickly in our sleep.

But death is often not like this. Many people, including novelist Mary Gordon's admirable mother, spend years in a threshold state somewhere between life and death, slowly declining in a nursing home, soiling themselves and forgetting the names of the people they've loved.

Such an end is so painful to witness and fraught with guilt for the caretakers that it can color their perception of the dying person's entire life.

In her new book, Circling My Mother, Gordon has tried her mightiest to see past her mother's long, ugly end, remember her as she was at other times, and reconstruct the way other people saw her. In doing so, Gordon has written a book that is a bracing work of love, observed and described.

Gordon's mother, Anna Gagliano Gordon, was the American daughter of a Sicilian father and an Irish mother. Polio maimed her in childhood, but she worked almost all her life, skipping school to put several younger siblings through college. She married late, after spending decades taking care of her mother, and had her only child when she was past 40, lost her husband to heart disease early in their marriage and lived into her 90s.

In a life that long, Anna interacted with many people, and her daughter came up with a way to reflect this through chapters on the many distinct roles she played, such as "My Mother and Her Sisters," and "My Mother and Her Friends." The structure of Circling My Mother serves as a reminder that people we think of only as they are in relation to ourselves can be quite different people in other contexts.

Gordon begins an early chapter, "My Mother and Her Bosses": "My mother was never only mine. She had a boss. She was his secretary long before she was my mother, and I never doubted that his demands, whose details were vague to me, took precedence over mine."

But far from feeling bitter about her mother working, Gordon saw it as a source of strength. "I did not envy children who stayed home with their mothers," she writes. "Their lives had a warmth mine lacked but it was a warmth without glamour, a glamour I absorbed because my mother left the house with me each morning, dressed in a suit, perfumed, carrying a handbag that had money in it she had made." Occasionally on weekends, Gordon accompanied her mother to the office where she worked as a legal secretary, and mimicked her, working on her poems in a stenographer's notebook at the boss' imposing oak desk. Even though Anna had no choice but to work, she relished it and took pride in it, and Gordon remembers her as always at her best when she was working.

Although work played a major role in Anna's life, she was far from a drudge; she had a wicked sense of humor and liked to sing show tunes around the house. She was a devout Catholic, never missing Mass, but that didn't prevent her from enjoying a laugh at others' expense.

"One of the pleasures in church was using the time between her early arrival . . . and the beginning of Mass to make fun of others in the congregation," Gordon writes. "Someone passed by with a large nose - 'How'd you like to have that full of nickels?' she'd say."

Anna's platonic relationships with her boss, her friends, and several priests nurtured her, but the demands and pettiness of her sniping family drove her to drink. In the chapter, "My Mother and Her Sisters," Gordon profiles each of her mother's four sisters, several of whom were selfish and cruel, and became the basis for some of Gordon's fictional characters. This was a family in which "being able to endure family ridicule was considered an important sign of character."

When seven-year-old Gordon was heartbroken over her father's death and their forced move into her grandmother's house, one aunt threw out most of her possessions, allowing her to keep little more than a few books. Gordon writes of a conversation she had with Mary McCarthy, in which they spoke about their aunts, "the joy-denying, life-denying women who had blighted our youth." McCarthy said, "There aren't any more aunts like that. It's all over," and raised a glass to toast their passing.

Toward the end of the book, in the chapter "My Mother's Body," Gordon struggles with the painful fact that her fierce love for her mother could not keep her thriving and alive ("My love prevented nothing.") "But," she writes, "if I speak of her, if I write about her, it is possible that I can prevent her disappearance. She will not evaporate, like a scent that is absorbed in air, into a nullity. My mother will not be nothing."

By capturing her mother's many angles, Gordon has succeeded in her task and will make her mother live again for every reader of this book. She has in some ways accomplished the impossible wish of every child, of any age, who is left motherless: She has brought her mother back from the dead, restored the dignity she ceded at the end of her life, and sent her off to work, in readers' minds, dressed in a business suit and smelling of Arpege.

And what about Dad?

Gordon has already written about the man she idolized until he died, when she was age 7. In The Shadow Man: A Daughter's Search for Her Father, the author chronicles her disillusionment after uncovering her father's many lies, including the fact that the man who married in a Catholic Church was actually born a Jew and was a fervent anti-Semite.

Jenny Shank's fiction has appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, Image and other journals. She writes about books for NewWest. net/books and lives in Boulder.