My caller ID flashed Morton Plante Hospital, the one near Mom in Florida. I hesitated, then answered.

“Your mother has been admitted to the hospital,” the caller said. “You’re the contact person.”

Really?

Twenty years earlier I stopped opening mail and taking calls from my mom. She had been a “difficult” mother at best, and trying to have an adult relationship wasn’t working. I did send her birthday cards – late – and usually a Mother’s Day card – also late.

Still, I flew to Florida the next morning and went directly to her hospital room. I stopped in the doorway to Purell my hands; Mom hadn’t raised a germ magnet. Once at a restaurant she took her fork under the table and set a lighter to it. “Sterilizes it,” she’d said.

Her door was mostly closed, and I was mostly not wanting to go in. But, in I went. The room was dark. No flowers. My oldest brother was a florist. He sent her flowers for everything: lilies at Easter, poinsettias at Christmas, roses for her birthday. Perhaps he hadn’t heard.

She was asleep, a mere sliver under the sheets. I’d feared her all my life – her hands, her words, her eyes. With those hands, she had put back thousands of Dixie cups of vodka, slapped faces, beaten a brother within an inch of his life, held millions of cigarettes and martinis, and popped thousands of pills. They were angry hands that I had forever tried to avoid. I remember her balling up her fists and banging her hands on the table. Now they were still and as she lay there, I wanted only peace for her. I wanted her to wake up and see Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. Instead, she woke to me, the least of her nine children.

“You came?”

“They called me.”

“Who?”

“The hospital.”

“You must be the only family contact left.” She looked me up and down and snuffed her nose the way she did when she was not having it.

The doctor walked in and smiled. She seemed fond of Mom, something I found to be true of many people who knew her. The doctor pulled back the bedding and listened to Mom’s heart and uncovered her feet and squeezed both ankles. She jotted on the clipboard hanging on the end of the bed. Without looking at me, she asked, “So, which one are you?”

“I’m Edna Jean,” I said, using the name my mother preferred. Never mind that I had not gone by Edna Jean since I was seven years old. Never mind that Mom had tried to change my name. Twice. Once to Thelma, and once to Cecelia.

The doctor nodded and turned to me. “You have one tough mother. She’s a fighter.”

I followed her to the hallway for the truth.

“Your mother is very weak,” she said. “Less than twenty percent of her heart is working. She is not going to get better, but I don’t know how long she has.”

Mom was sitting up when I returned to the room. “Isn’t she smart?” she said. She closed her eyes and put on her “negotiating hands,” the way some women do to make a point. My own girls tell me I do it all the time.

“What are you here for?” She pursed her lips. “What do you want from me?”

A prickle started up the back of my neck. The colors in the room grew duller. And I simply knew everything was the same. I wanted nothing. What I had was a mission: to get her dead and in heaven. I was there for the business of dying.

I was pretty sure I was not the one she wanted. I wanted to say, “Jesus loves you, and it’s all going to be okay.” I knew she was fond of Jesus, Mary and Joseph.

“Nothing,” I said. “No apologies. We move forward from here. You’re dying, and I’m the one you’re going to die with.”

She motioned for me to draw near so she could whisper. “My purse is on the windowsill. Take it to my apartment. I don’t want anyone to get into it.” She always held her purse close to her bosom and never let it out of her sight. My sisters and brothers often remarked about its weight. How heavy can twisted-up Kleenexes, rain bonnets, Pall Mall Gold cigarettes, Valium and lifesavers be?

“I’ve already signed the DNR,” she said. “Now hand me my purse.” She shuffled through and pulled out a set of keys. “Let yourself in. There are clean sheets on the bed. Don’t eat the tuna in the fridge; it’s got mayonnaise in it.”

At her apartment, I wheeled my things to her door. A couple of limey green lizards flitted near the entrance and slipped into the Floridian greenery. Inside, the apartment smelled of bleach. I recognized the coastal scene hanging above Mom’s beach-style couch. It was painted by Helen, her friend from before kids and troubles. Helen was the only one who came – all the way from Connecticut – when Mom had her nervous breakdown when I was seven.

Mother still had the drop-down desk from my growing-up years. The desk seemed cheap and frail, not at all like I remembered. One drawer held several legal-sized manila envelopes labeled in Mother’s beautiful penmanship.

The envelopes were rubber-banded together, addressed to me and my siblings. These were form letters from a lawyer asking our permission to move my father’s ashes from the military cemetery to a public one, so Mom could be buried next to him. I had checked, “I do not approve.” My face felt hot. Who was I – at the time, thirty-one years old – to have said, “No, you cannot be buried beside your husband”? I flipped through the documents. Each of us had said, “No.”

A yellowed envelope held the deed for the house I grew up in on Vandalia Street – thirteen thousand dollars paid in full. After that house, we moved across town to Scott Drive, where my parents briefly separated and contemplated divorce. Neither of them attended Mass there. Moving had disconnected them from the old neighborhood parish. No one knew them on this side of town. In the bedroom, Mom’s matching mahogany furniture included a bedside table with her prayer book and rosary. The closet’s mirrored doors took up most of one wall. I opened them, careful not to leave fingerprints. The closet was filled with various shades of blue, mostly navy: slacks, sweaters, skirts, dresses. She’d worn torn muumuus and one or two nightgowns when I was growing up.

The top shelf held a dozen navy blue handbags – all basically the same as the one I brought from the hospital. Kneeling on the closet floor, I looked through at least fifteen shoeboxes filled with pairs of navy-blue shoes, mostly the same flat Mary Janes, several with leather bows. I remembered the scuffed old penny loafers she wore while I was growing up.

In the kitchen, the whole bottom shelf of the fridge was lined with small jars of spices. I considered eating the tuna, but Mom was sure to ask about it. One of the stories she enjoyed retelling was the one about Mary Jo eating outdated tuna and getting deathly sick. “I told her not to eat it,” Mom would say, shaking her head.

The packages of peanut butter, sugar, and chocolate chip cookie dough in the freezer had been cut into. The leftovers were tightly saran wrapped. That’s how the tiny apartment felt: used and tightly saran wrapped.

I thought of calling my older sister Beth. But, because Mother wasn’t speaking to her, I thought I should avoid her too. I didn’t want to be yelled at. Jesus hadn’t shown up yet. And I’d not seen neither hide nor hair of Mary or Joseph.

Back at the hospital, I bought a bag of honeyroasted peanuts at the gift shop and hung around in the lobby looking at pictures of the hospital’s founders. I considered going into the chapel to see if Jesus might appear and tell me what to do or say to Mom. Finally, I went to her room. Two hospice nurses were talking to her about what to expect.

“She’s been a nurse herself,” I blurted out. One turned to Mom. “You told us you were a school bus driver!” That was true. She had driven a school bus for kids with disabilities for a couple of years. Mom introduced me as her daughter.

“How many children do you have?” the other nurse asked.

“Eight living and three deceased, two at birth.”

Her answer surprised me. I never knew about her stillborn children till then. That explained why my sister and I were three years apart. Mom had had two sets of “Irish twins,” siblings born less than a year apart, and most of us kids were ridiculously close in age – not much different from other Catholic families. Mom jutted her chin forward. “It’s not easy to survive your children.”

Just another example that everything was about her, I thought. But she was spent. She was dying. And dying takes a lot of doing. She no longer cared if I had eaten or for my comfort. She was using all her energies to set up the details of hospice care at home. She’d spent her drunken, breakdown years as a lapsed Catholic, but I knew she was a woman of faith, so to speak. I also knew she was afraid to die.

I read her the Lord’s Prayer from Matthew. Then I began, “You know I’m not a nun or anything special, Mom, but what the Catholics leave out is the last bit about how if you don’t forgive others you won’t be forgiven either. You’ll end up in Hell, plain and simple.”

She nodded. She got that. She was afraid of fire. That’s why she wouldn’t be cremated. She bowed her head a bit. “Well, I need to work on that.”

Her dinner came, and she lifted the silver cover. “Look, I get salt now.” I caught a whiff of Salisbury steak and said goodbye. I leaned in, and she kissed my cheek.

“Thanks for coming,” she whispered.

I picked up her purse and shoved it under my armpit. In the parking lot, I spotted the two hospice nurses. I managed to choke out, “I have seven siblings, and she’s angry with them all. Me too, probably. It’s not a pretty family situation. She wasn’t the best mother.”

“Don’t worry,” one said. “We’ve seen a lot of messy families. Your mother won’t pass until she makes peace.”

At the apartment I phoned my sisters and brothers to tell them they needed to make peace with Mom so she could die. I didn’t think making peace appealed to any one of them, so I really laid it on thick. “The hospice nurses said this was the only way to get her to die.”

I pleaded with each of them. “Don’t expect anything from her. Just let her know you love her or are thinking about her.” I can’t say for certain that all of them wanted her dead. Either way, I never asked whether they chose to call her. I knew full well they might not.

My flight was early the next morning. That evening I lay in the tiny apartment where Mom would eventually end her days. Ten hours from her nearest daughter, seventeen hours away from me, fifteen hours away from the rest.

I paid her one more visit. She said she had two life insurance policies, her bills were paid, her rent was paid through the end of the month and she had cancelled her newspaper subscription. “I’d like you to have the china.” She paused. “Only if you want it.”

Mom loved dishes. She had spent a lifetime accumulating them one piece at a time: a gravy boat, a creamer, a meat platter, a dessert plate. She used Green Stamps, shopped specials at Spiess, and ordered them from the Spiegel’s catalog. And, she had meticulously cared for her china. As children, if china was used to set the table, it was the one time we were guaranteed to get out of doing the dishes. I opened my mouth to speak, but she spoke again.

“I think you would be the one who would enjoy it,” she said. “Would you come back for the dishes…. I don’t want to die alone.”

“I’ll come back before you die.”

*** It was less than six weeks when Mom’s phone number flashed on my caller ID. The hospice nurse said, “She wants you to pick up the china.”

“Now? Come now?”

“Yes.”

“Can I bring Beth? Ask her if I can bring Beth.”

“Come now and bring Beth,” the nurse said.

Beth lived in Alabama, eight hundred miles from me in Kansas. And it was another four hundred fortynine miles to Florida. I drove to Alabama and met Beth.

The hospice nurse called again. “She doesn’t have very long,” the nurse said. “Her breaths are down to seven a minute.”

“I’m driving as fast as I can.” I knew I wasn’t going to save her, but I needed to get there. She wanted me.

When it came time to step over the threshold of Mom’s apartment, I saw the couch up against the wall with the oak buffet squeezed in next to it. The hospital bed stood in the middle of the room, its head mashed up against the kitchen wall. I closed the door and got behind Beth.

“I can’t do it.” Beth changed places with me and pushed the door open again, and I entered.

“Edna Jean, did you come for the china?”

Mom looked like she had always looked to me, like she did lying in the Hide-a-Bed forty years earlier. I sat next to her.

The hospice nurse leaned over my shoulder and whispered, “Hold her hand.”

I reached for Mom’s hand. Her eyes were tightly closed. Her grip was so incredibly tight, and she clawed and pinched my hand.

“I have to go now,” she said over and over.

The hospice nurse said, “We tell her it’s okay to use the diaper.”

“No, no,” I said. “She’s telling us she needs to go now. That’s what she’d say when we were kids. ‘I need to go now.’ To the grocery store, or to her newspaper job, or her hair appointments.”

“I need to go now,” Mom said again.

All three of us chimed in, “It’s okay. You can go.”

“We know you’re tired,” I said. “It’s okay to leave.”

And she went that night with Beth cradling her head, talking softly to her, sharing scriptures of peace.

I was sleeping, then Beth came in and woke me. “It’s over.”

Two days later I left Mom’s apartment with the china, Helen’s painting, Mom’s Indian blanket, and the white sweater Mom’s sister-in-law knitted for her.

I had wanted so much more.

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