Your Afternoon Cry: Scott Simon Live-Tweets From His Mom's Deathbed

People who grew up listening to public radio are a rare breed, in that they’re obsessed with “their” radio hosts. Ask anyone in radio about the responses they get when people figure out who they are in public and they’ll tell you stories of people freaking out upon meeting them –which is especially funny, given that most of the people coming up to them have only heard their voice before. So given what we know about radio listeners, the emotional response that NPR Weekend Edition host Scott Simon has gotten over the past couple weeks as he’s been live-tweeting his mother’s hospital stay is less than surprising.

Simon’s mother Pat Simon Newman Gilband went into a Chicago hospital on July 16; he says she told him “I can’t talk. I’m surrounded by handsome men”:

Spending time with his mother in the hospital Simon has reflected on everything from the sad state of medical care in America (“Heard from many docs & nurses that they have too many clerical chores to pay attention they’d like to patients. That’s like farmers who would say he has to fill out too many USDA forms to grow anything.”) to the grace he’s seen from his mom to what he’s learned from her. She is very funny:

He’s gotten the attention of many including Wait, Wait….Don’t Tell Me! host Peter Sagal, who wrote:

Gillband – who you can hear in her own words in this StoryCorps story from a few years back – is full of wisdom, so follow along here.