As I sat with my mom for the last time that day, I sat at the edge of her bed and watched her chest rise and fall with each breath, wondering which breath would be the last one—both hoping and dreading that that last breath would happen after I left. She would open her watery brown eyes every so often, her gaze muzzy and movements slow, raising her sparse eyebrows as if perpetually surprised by something. That is how it had been for the last few days. Sometimes she was upbeat and alert, other times distant and confused. My sisters and I had tried so hard to extract memories from her, starting so many sentences with “Remember when…?”

“Remember when we picked so many blackberries that summer and had a berry fight, covering ourselves in their sticky, purple juice?”

“Remember when we drove up to Hurricane Ridge and we girls had a pretend fight in the back seat to distract you from the steep cliff on the edge of the road?”

Sometimes she would focus her milky gaze on us and she would be there with us in those memories. Other times she was remembering something else, something we couldn’t see or hear or touch that was hers alone. But our compulsion to gather these random, broken memories never lessened. We held each fragment she offered up to the light, searching for some answer or some truth to hold on to, before reluctantly storing it in a pocket for another day, when that small connection would be all that we would have left.

That day dawned with a particularly gorgeous Pacific Northwest morning—the kind of morning where you turned your face to the fleeting warmth of the sun. I opened the curtains in her bedroom so we could see that golden sunlight stream through the tall trees in the back yard, igniting the overgrown grass in a glowing patch of emerald green. Through the open window we could hear the rumble of the lawn mower as the neighbor cut his lawn. The sweet scent of fresh cut grass mixed with the acrid stink of gasoline, not entirely unpleasant, was a keen reminder of long-ago days full of summer chores in the yard, once dreaded and now cherished memories of time together. All morning, I kept looking at the clock, silently counting the hours, then the minutes, watching them slip away like garden soil between dirt-darkened fingers. Sitting by her, I kept thinking how blessed I was to have those last moments—an unexpected opportunity for goodbye—and I found myself at a loss. I could not think of a damned thing to say and it scared me. I was afraid I was letting this moment escape like an untethered canoe floating silently away.

“I want to go home,” she whispered, looking at me with bleary eyes.

“You are home, Mama,” I replied softly, taking her hand. Her skin was paper thin, and I could see her pulse throb gently in the gray-blue veins at her wrist. I lightly rubbed her knobby knuckles, thick with arthritis, and was reminded of those same hands teaching me to tie my shoes when I was four.

“I just want to go home,” she repeated. I had never heard her sound so forlorn, and I found myself searching her face for clues to what she was really asking but could find nothing but a haunted expression and dull, vacant eyes.

Was she wanting to go back to our old house? The one she lived in before Pops passed? Or back out to Seabeck, to where she grew up? Or, maybe to the place where our people came from, where The People of the Inside and the People of the Clear Salt Water have always been?

Were our ancestors calling her home?

She rambled on about people she wanted to see, and mumbled about other things that made little sense. I wished fiercely that I had thought to ask her more questions. There was still so much I didn’t know. But I took a deep breath and let the sadness flow through me like a wave of cold water, until I felt only a fleeting trickle. I rubbed her legs and was reminded of how I used to tease her about not wearing shorts in public because she was embarrassed to show her legs. “What makes you think everyone is checking out your sexy legs, anyway?” I would ask and she would laugh and laugh. I brushed her hair, which hung softly past her shoulders for the first time in more than fifty years, finally back to its natural brown with only the slightest smattering of gray at the temples.

I showed her pictures of my girls, recounted stories of our adventures together, and sang her some of the songs I could remember that would always remind me only of her. Bette Midler’s “The Rose” had always been a favorite and she’d asked me to play it for both Granny and Uncle Ray when they passed. It brought her some meager comfort as I hummed the tune softly in her ear.

Some thoughts she could hang onto, but others were fleeting. And as the seconds ticked by, I reminded her, frequently, that I had to go soon. My living so far away from home had always been a challenge for us; Port Orchard was very far from San Diego. Though I was just one of her many children, I was always the one she leaned on, the one that took care of everything.
Every so often she would ask me if I could stay all day, or if I could wait and just go home tomorrow.

“But why do you have to go?” She lamented like a plaintive child.

She asked me if she could get a plane ticket too.

She asked me when I would be back.

She asked me who was going to put her to bed after I left.

I sat there trying to figure out what to say—how to answer her when I knew she was dying, but I didn’t know if she knew she was. With each minute that passed, the empty space inside me began to fill with something. I felt like a can of soda that had been shaken one too many times. I felt the prickling pressure of the bubbles building in my chest, rising to the top of my head. The tears were hell-bent on finding ways out through small cracks in the mask I was trying so desperately to keep together, for both our sakes.

I was running out of time.

I thought frantically about what these final moments meant—and what I wanted to say. I wanted to articulate something perfectly profound that I am sure was described so eloquently in one of the millions of Harlequin Romance books she used to read in bed, a Tootsie Pop between her lips. But what?

I knew, logically, there was nothing that I could say in that moment that would be able to encompass everything I was feeling, nothing that would be able to heal any wounds or fulfill any promises or create any new hopes and dreams. And it left me dumbfounded.

I’d spent my whole life having words with my mom—saying them and hearing them. Loving words, angry words, hopeful words, sad and happy words. As a child, the words were my begging for her attention, waking her in the middle of the night because I’d had a bad dream, and asking her questions about any of the hordes of craft projects she was putting together.

“Why is it we do every craft but weaving baskets? You know, lots of Natives weave baskets. I could teach you,” I joked, as she deftly crocheted the tiniest of threads into her own intricate piece of art.

As a teenager, the words were my shouting at her that I hated her, telling her I was going to drive whether she liked it or not, and completely ignoring most of the words she said to me between the ages of thirteen and eighteen.

“I understand my driving scares you, but you’re going to have to get over it. I was six when my brother died in that car—you can’t keep punishing me for that!” I screamed before I stormed out the door.

And finally, as a grown woman, the words were my telling her I was pregnant the first time, crying with her when I had lost a baby, and celebrating with her when my youngest daughter was finally born. We would spend hours on the phone, calling each other six or seven times a day. I would cry to her when I was homesick, ask for help when I didn’t know how to be a good mom yet, and listen patiently as she taught me to make chicken and gravy over the phone, all from 1200 miles away. Many times, If she hadn’t heard from me in two hours, she would call to ask me why I hadn’t called yet.

“I am so sorry for everything I ever did as a teenager,” I cried, as my own teenagers drove me crazy.

So many words. A lifetime of them—and now the well was truly empty.

I had the stunning realization that if she didn’t know before that day how much I loved her, how much I was going to miss her, and how much she meant to me—nothing said in that moment was going to fix it. We had formed a bond, she and I, that was deeper than mother and daughter. I had learned to see her as her own person and I was so blessed to know her as the strong, talented woman she was. I knew her humor and her work ethic and her ability to create something out of nothing. She was flawed beyond belief, but she was so much more than cigarettes and dying.

Mom said, once, that she didn’t want flowers sent after she died someday—that if we couldn’t be bothered to send them to her when she was alive, she sure as shit didn’t want them when she wasn’t. I now think last words are just like funeral flowers—if we don’t say them when they deserve to be said—but wait until the end—you can’t do anything with them but sadly watch them wilt and crumble into nothing. That final moment with her taught me that, in the grand scheme of things, last words don’t mean shit. It’s the first words and the middle words that mean everything—all of the I love yous, the nicknames, the secrets, the jokes, the memories. It’s even the fighting words, if they’re accompanied in time by forgiving words. It’s the whispers, the laughs, the songs, the stories, and all the words left unspoken because you already know what they are without saying.

So that last day, as I sat by her bed for what was the last time, I realized I had no more words to say—nothing profound or poetic or especially meaningful. I thought to myself, how lucky am I? I was blessed to have some final moments with my mom, an opportunity to say anything I needed to or wanted to, and I didn’t need to say a single thing because it had all been said already in a million words and a million little ways over a lifetime. I made a vow, right then, that if I did nothing else in my life I would leave nothing unsaid with my own daughters so that someday they, too, could understand the feeling I had just discovered.

I whispered how much I loved her as I watched her doze, as I sat silently there with my cup of coffee, my hand on hers. Her eyes weren’t even open when I left—there was no goodbye. I kissed
her swiftly and carried that lifetime of words in my heart as I walked out the door. I never looked back.

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