Google “my mother died” and you will get over 500,000 hits. Google “my mother is dying” and the number drops to a little over 15,000. I think I understand why that is. It’s the finality of the former that prompts people to talk. It’s the grief. It’s the need to say something about her death that makes a person speak. While she’s still alive there’s only the moment of her death approaching, like a sky darkening with an oncoming storm when the first drops have yet to fall and the air is beginning to smell vaguely of rain, — while she’s still alive, there’s only anticipation, and breath, and quiet anticipation.

Tonight, the day after her 83rd birthday, I spoke with my mom on the phone for awhile, hearing her labored breath and fatigue as well as her joy at talking with me. She was very up front with me: she’s not doing well; her health is sliding downhill faster, now. They have her on both methadone and morphine to ease the pain. (It won’t be long.) My mother’s bones are as fragile as a bird’s, her spine is curving from the exclamation point of the young to the interrogative mark of the elderly. Her organs, especially her heart, are being compressed and distressed. “Sometimes I find myself thinking, I just want this over with! I don’t want to wait any longer!” she said to me. Sometimes, though, she wants to stay long enough to hear the voices of all her children one more time. Just one more day with familial voices softly, implicitly entreating her to love each moment more.

Tonight, I thanked her. “I know that you always tried”, I said, and she did. She tried. She loves me now just as she did when I was born, and however she mismanaged things or misunderstood me, her heart’s love was, and is, genuine. I made her cry with my words. They were words she needed to hear at the end of her days. She said, “After I’m gone, I’m going to give all you children a hug every morning”. Genuine love. (It won’t be long.)

Some part of me feels, totally irrationally, that someday I’ll look back on this whole “my mom is dying” thing and think how glad I am that she didn’t, that she’ll live forever. But when I look into my own thoughts, I know that she’ll soon be gone, permanently gone, irretrievably gone. My mother will have died, will have entered the silence only broken by those left behind. She will exist as a dynamic collection of memories in my brain and in the brains of others. My memories of her will be unique and wholly my own, and nobody will ever be able to read them or comprehend them in their totality. When my mother dies, I will never feel her warm hands on my cheeks again, never again feel her breath brush the short hairs of my neck as she hugs me, never look into her pale eyes that saw me as me. But I will remember, and I will feel her hands and her breath in the emotions I’ve wrapped them in. In my memories I will always know that my mother did live, concretely, as a real person who gave birth to me, fixed food for me, tucked me into bed, nursed my wounds and smiled at my laughter, fought with me, made up with me, rallied for me, … and on and on, loved me.

My mother is dying. She will soon be gone. I, however, will carry her love on. She taught me to carry it forward, even when she failed me. Even when she failed me, I say, but I have forgiven her her shortcomings. She has been, like me, like all of us, just another person in the world, as prone to minor and major follies and foibles and tragic flaws as anyone else. Unlike anyone else, though, she gave me life and she loved me endlessly as her child. Even when the meaning amounted to different things, she wanted the best for me. Well, she was the best for me; from her I learned that love matters most, that kindness is better than its lack, that in the end there is no one whose story you know completely save your own — so who are you to lay judgment on anybody’s doorstep? She didn’t mean you had to love or even like everyone, let alone those who did terrible things. She meant that you ought to at least understand that people all have lives you can’t really know, and what they do is caused or created in them for reasons you’ll never fathom or even see.

I’ll do my best to remember what she tried to teach me, try to grow on what I learned from her. That’s how I’ll honor her now and after she’s gone. (It won’t be long.)

.

But oh… how this hurts.