Scott Simon, host of NPR's Weekend Edition, is tweeting from the hospital bedside of his mother, Patricia Lyons Simon Newman Gilband, as she approaches death -- and has drawn 1.2 million followers to a moving, occasionally funny and very 21st century chronicle of one of life's universal experiences, the death of a parent.

One Tweet posted on his feed reads "I am getting a life's lesson about grace from my mother in the ICU. We never stop learning from our mothers, do we?"

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