Conan writer Laurie Kilmartin recounts live-tweeting as she watched her mom dying from coronavirus on an iPad

Slate

The comedian spent the week leading up to the death of her mom, JoAnn Kilmartin, last Thursday, live-tweeting while watching via Facetime as her mom's condition worsened. Kilmartin used the tweets to find humor amid her grief. "I just held an iPad to my chest and wailed, 'i love you I love you, I’m sorry, dont leave me,' which is great pratice for when I use this same iPad for post-quar Tinder," she tweeted two days before her mom's death. Kilmartin says of her tweets: "In comedy terms, it’s like, if I make a joke about this very specific thing, there’s no way it’s going to happen, right? I would make jokes about my mom slipping in the shower or whatever, just to, like, almost protect her. Because it would be too on the nose for my mom to die exactly the way I had predicted in a joke. In a way doing a joke about my mom getting COVID is a way of me going, Well, she’s not going to get it because I made jokes about it. And there’s no way those two things never intersect. It obviously didn’t work. The coronavirus is very strong and it doesn’t pay attention to my ridiculous rules."