A television critic inevitably spends a fair amount of time bemoaning what is on television. My mother, especially after illness made it increasingly hard for her to read novels, was a reminder of the immense gift television can be. She had friends, visitors, and telephone calls, but there was also a continuous visual (she was a painter) and informational thirst that only television could assuage. “I don’t know what I’d do without television,” was a sentence I often heard her utter.

When I turned off the TV in her hospital room in Angers, France, for the final time on March 16, two days before her death, it didn’t take a television critic to know that the end of television meant the end of life. Not that my mother noticed. The sound was off and she was asleep anyway. By this stage, there was no longer anything on television that could interest the still beautiful woman known successively as Mary McDermott, Mary Harris, Mary Bernhard, and, finally, Mary Sitwell.

A few months earlier, when she was at home, how different things had been. The living room in the 19th-century apartment she rented for a song was straight out of a Balzac novel: 18-foot-high ceilings, silk-paneled walls, oak chevron floors, paintings and books and antique furniture everywhere, along with immense windows of hand-blown glass overlooking a classically French park.

Only one item seemed sleekly alien: In front of the white marble fireplace, placed on an old wooden chest, was a flat-screen TV permanently tuned to a handful of English-language channels: CNN International, BBC World, Sky News. The television would be switched on as soon as my mother rose in the morning, and switched off before she went to bed. It was a habit she developed after the death of her third husband in 2000, and not even the presence of a son could persuade her to relinquish her hold on this trusted remedy against loneliness. There was a world outside, but she could no longer visit it. Television brought the world in, and she clung to it fiercely. When she said, “Pass me the télé-commande” (the French term for the remote), she could make it sound like “Bring me the head of Alfredo Garcia.”

Still, the television she watched had little to do with the sort of shows I normally review. When she accidentally glimpsed a popular program such as “CSI,” she’d complain that the faces looked plastic and switch the channel. Her television diet was sharply defined — news and sports — and a reminder that no matter how many new shows critics review, millions pay them no attention whatsoever. The name David Caruso would have meant nothing to her, yet she reveled in the histrionics of CNN’s Richard Quest, delighted in the pugnacious political interviews on BBC World, kept daily tabs on the temperature in Rangoon, took a girlish delight in the motor car racing on “Top Gear,” and found a tennis tournament such as the U.S. Open to be a fortnight’s feast. Reality, not fiction, was what she was after.

There was an inevitable downside to my mother’s reliance on television. It had become an addiction, the bubbles in the champagne bottle that kept her life from going flat. She occasionally seemed overstimulated by the endlessly recycled barrage of images and information. When, in January, she had to move into a nursing home, she underwent a fairly brutal form of television withdrawal. The small, old-fashioned box in her room carried only the five French channels she habitually ignored. No more CNN and BBC World and Eurosport — only the nature programs carried by the French-German channel Arte brought her joy. “Oh, look at the babies!” she’d exclaim whenever a polar bear or monkey or other cute but unidentifiably obscure member of the animal kingdom traipsed across the screen. She wondered why there wasn’t a channel devoted solely to her favorite animals, cats.

Often the screen remained dark for hours. Removed from the media drip, she became calmer, more detached, and — after an initial period of irritation — more content. She knew she was dying, and in the silence of her room, stretched out on the bed, she was able to prepare for the future and reconsider the past. Having grown up in downtown Los Angeles, she had spent most of her adult life abroad — Italy, Morocco, Holland, Liberia, Portugal, England, France, as well as three years in the “Mad Men” era of New York. It was a rich and varied life, and there was much to think and be thankful about.

By chance, my job as a TV critic helped prepare me for her end. In January I reviewed the HBO documentary “Andrew Jenks, Room 335,” which included a controversial scene of an agonized woman thrashing about in her bed shortly before her death. I had a premonition of what was to come when I saw it, and it helped me understand what was happening to my mother on the morning she began to die.

It took her more than two hours to exorcize her own life, but finally she succeeded, and her last 10 minutes were ones of perfect peace. There was no death rattle, just breath coming softer and softer, head flung back on the pillow, white lips formed in a perfect “O,” blue eyes staring straight up toward heaven. It was not the sort of thing you usually see on television, and the television was off.

bbernhard@earthlink.net