I heard that when someone is dying, they see loved ones who have already died. I’ve always liked this idea. I hoped Mom would have this experience, and I hoped I would be there for it. I wondered who she would see. Her own mother, whom she’d adored? Angie, her favorite sister? Ed, her favorite brother? Maryanne, her best friend?

Mom did have this experience, and I was there, but as is often the case, the reality was very different from the fantasy.

My brother Greg, sister Jen, and I were living together for the first time in decades. We’d extended our Christmas visits indefinitely, taken leaves of absence from our jobs. We’d come together to help our mom die.

We took her to the emergency room a few days before Christmas. She’d started falling. At least three times a day we’d find her sitting next to a chair, or in the bathroom, unable to get up. “I don’t really fall,” she said. “I just have a misstep and end up on the floor.” The first diagnosis was an untreated urinary tract infection. Antibiotics were prescribed, and a nurse, an occupational therapist, and a physical therapist made weekly visits. She seemed to be getting better, doing her chair exercises, walking around the room every hour with her walker, and taking the antibiotics three times a day.

It was the occupational therapist who said, “She’s not using her left side much. It’s very weak.”

None of us had noticed and we weren’t particularly concerned. Mom had been blind in her left eye ever since ocular melanoma took it thirty years earlier. It made sense that she would favor her right side. But we took her to the emergency room anyway. She passed every memory test, knew what day it was, knew where she was, knew the date of her birth, July 30, 1931, knew who the president was. “Unfortunately,” she said, “it’s Donald J. Trump.” It’s just routine, we all thought, when they wheeled her into another room to get an MRI.

I was sitting in a reclining hospital chair, reading something on my phone, looking forward to going home, ordering a pizza, and binge-watching season three of The Crown with my sister, when the doctor finally came back. We hadn’t seen him since the MRI, at least an hour ago—hospital time is different than ordinary time, I thought. He looked at Mom with that bland, mildly friendly doctor expression that is so hard to read, then he looked at us. Mom didn’t have her hearing aid in, so she didn’t hear what he said next.

“She has a brain tumor.”

“What?”

“It’s benign, but very large. It’s slow growing. Probably been there around ten years.” He didn’t add the sentence, It will kill her. He just recommended hospice. When my brother cornered him in the hall, he said he’d be surprised if she lasted two weeks.

She was still alive six weeks later. “She’s in the end stage,” the nurse said Monday of the sixth week. Hospice started coming every day. I spent every day in the room with her and Greg spent every night. Jen kept the house running, did the laundry, loaded and unloaded the dishwasher, went to the grocery store. Mom mostly slept in the narrow hospice bed with the gray plastic casing and metal bars. We made it as comfortable as we could. She had a soft blanket and down pillows. But every night she said, “I want to sleep in my own bed.”

When we’d brought her home from the hospital, before the hospice equipment arrived, I helped put her into her own bed. “That looks so inviting,” she said, when I pulled back the covers. As I was tucking her in, she looked up at me and said, “You’re wonderful.”

I thought we should let her sleep there.

But Jen, whose house we were in, insisted on the hospice bed.

“It’s safer,” she said.

“I think she’ll be fine and hospice said it was okay. Greg, what do you think?” I asked.

“Either way is fine.”

I knew Mom would rather stay in the hospice bed than have us fight over it, so that’s where she stayed. But on New Year’s Eve, I was alone with her. Greg and Jen had taken the night off to go out to dinner. I decided to let her sleep in her own bed. I slept on a mattress next to it. About an hour before midnight, she woke up and announced, “I need to go to the bathroom.” I got out the walker, took it over to her bed, helped her to stand up. She tried to take a step, got a confused look on her face and crumpled to the floor. I managed to get her up and to the bathroom, but on the way back to bed, she fell again. This time, there was no getting her up. She seemed weaker than she had been five minutes ago. After struggling for what seemed like hours, both of us trying our hardest, I was able to get her onto the mattress on the floor. While I was half rolling, half dragging her, she said, “I know I’m dying. I just hope it goes fast.”

I felt a sense of relief when she said this. We had never explicitly told her she was dying. When the doctor brought in the scan, wheeled it to the edge of the hospital bed, we gathered round, blocking Mom’s view, whispering about who should tell her.

“I can’t,” I said.

“Neither can I,” Jen and Greg spoke in unison.

“Can you tell her?” I asked the doctor.

“Doctor,” Mom said, “are my children afraid to give me bad news?”

“Mary,” he said, “you have a mass in your brain.”

“That doesn’t sound good,” she said.

We broached the subject of surgery, though we’d been told it was very unlikely to change her outcome.

“No surgery. I want to go home,” said Mom.

We took her home that afternoon. Hospice came the same day.

* * *

It’s going to be tonight, I’m sure, I thought a few days after the nurse told us, “It could happen any time.”

But it wasn’t. It wasn’t that night and it wasn’t the night after that.

She didn’t talk anymore. She’d stopped reading the paper. She didn’t eat or drink. We kept her hydrated with ice chips. How long can this last, I thought every morning. We were all heartbroken. She’d been a good mom. We didn’t want her to die, but she was going to. We’d put our lives on hold, and we needed to get back to them. Sitting in the room with her, I watched episode after episode of Law & Order. Watching the police and the district attorneys do everything they could to see that justice was served comforted me. The familiarity of the episodes, some of which I’d already seen several times, was oddly relaxing.

During commercials, I watched Mom, looking for a change, wanting to make sure to call Greg and Jen so they would be there when it happened. But it didn’t happen. And it didn’t happen. And it didn’t happen. I wandered downstairs where Greg and Jen were watching a situation comedy about the afterlife. I walked to the refrigerator, took out a bottle of white wine, and gave myself a generous pour. “Why won’t she die?” I said to no one in particular.

There is ordinary time, there is hospital time, and there is waiting-for-someone-to-die time, I thought.

Both things I’d been waiting for happened two days later.

We were all sitting on the edge of her bed. The room was dimly lit, like I’d imagined it would be. Mom was sitting up. She knew where she was. She knew who she was with. “Why don’t you have some wine,” she said. None of us felt like it.

“Do you want some, Mom?” I asked.

“Sure, I’ll have a little.” I brought her a glass and gave her a few sips. She seemed happy. “I know him,” she said, pointing her finger toward the air.

“Who is it, Mom?”

This is it, I thought. She’s going to see someone.

“It’s the Gestapo,” Mom said.

“Did you hear that?” I said.

“Yes, we heard it.”

The Gestapo was Mom’s sardonic nickname for our father. He was what nineteenth-century novelists called a domestic tyrant. When he was home, everyone tiptoed around him. His temper was volatile. We all feared him. When he was not home, there was a palpable feeling of calm that dissolved the moment he walked through the door. A man who lived by routine, he came home from his job delivering mail every day at 3:30. Mom would watch him walk up the driveway and say, “The Gestapo is home.” We all ran to our rooms and hid out until dinner.

He had a way of taking the joy out of special occasions. Once he yelled at me for tracking mud into the house when we were bringing in the Christmas tree. My six-year-old enthusiasm was crushed, the excitement of putting up the tree gone. Mom told me once that she stopped loving Dad because of the way he treated her children. She had a strong desire to outlive him. When he died, she didn’t cry. She didn’t seem sad. She seemed relieved.

And this is who she sees? Him? Why? Were Mom and he going to be reunited in the afterlife? Would she spend all eternity with a man whose company she loathed? Did his spirit come so he could assert his will over his family one final time?

Or maybe she saw him because she knew in his own screwed up way he had loved us and she thought he should be here for this moment.

She drifted off after she said this, and we all went to bed.

It was a little before midnight when Greg knocked on my door. “Julie, I think she’s gone,” he said. I got up, went into the room next door and saw that this was true. It had finally happened. What we’d been waiting for. Not wanting, but waiting for.
My mother was dead.

* * *

The week between her death and the funeral was a blur. Going to the funeral home, going to the church to talk to the priest, deciding what songs to sing, writing the obituary, calling and texting relatives, eating casseroles the neighbors brought, ordering lasagna and salad for the post-funeral gathering. Viewing the body.

Mom had made it very clear: She did not want an open casket. We weren’t going to have the traditional rosary and viewing the night before the funeral Mass, but the immediate family has to see the body one final time before the lid on the casket is closed.

Seeing her in the satin-lined casket, knowing it was her but not her, perfectly made up, with pale pink lipstick and a touch of blush, a serene expression on her face, wearing the Armani jacket she’d bought at a consignment shop, a rosary wound through her fingers, knowing this would be the last time I’d see her, I cried for the first time.

My sister said, “Oh, my sweet mommy.” And I thought, it’s funny—we never called her mommy when she was alive, but it seems right in this moment.

“Goodbye, Mommy,” I said.

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