I arrive in New Jersey after a red-eye flight from Los Angeles and join my dad at his house for a quick coffee.

“Mom won’t be coming home from the hospital,” he says. “Not this time.”

I’m shattered. My dad has been a purveyor of unceasing hope over these past eight cancerous years. To hear him say this is the end, lands with eternal finality.

Not knowing how the day will play out, we drive separate cars to St. Barnabas Medical Center, fifteen minutes away.

“Uh-oh, I must really be in trouble if you’re here again,” my mom says. Her translucent blue eyes sparkle as she smiles. Several months ago, I sat at the piano with her and shared a new song from my musical. Now she’s propped up in a gurney, about to get an MRI. I walk beside her as she’s wheeled down the hospital’s basement corridor. My physician dad is seeing patients in the oncology ward.

I call my wife, Jackie, once my mom is inside the MRI.

“It’s not good. Not good at all,” I say. Jackie cries. After we hang up, I recall a moment three years earlier with my mom.

My seven-year-old daughter, Addie, sleeps on the couch in my parents’ den, knocked out from yet another seizure. Six years of epilepsy and counting. It’s the day after Thanksgiving. We’re visiting Montclair for the long weekend. Jackie and Leo, our four-year-old son, roll down the yellow-brown grass of my parent’s backyard hill. My mom and I are in the kitchen. She preps teriyaki salmon as I flip through New Yorker cartoons. She’s never in a rush. She takes a seat across from me at the kitchen’s wooden island.

“How are you?” she asks. She snaps off some grapes from the bunch in front of her.

“Addie seems good,” I say. “A little tired for sure, but happy.”

She puts her elbows on the wooden island and leans forward. “But… How are you doing?” she asks.

I look back at her but can’t find the words.

Visitors by the dozen have come to see her during the past few days. I don’t know if my mom was aware of any of them. She would have enjoyed seeing her high school classmate, Bette, who brought her 1959 Long Beach, New York high school yearbook. Color guard, majorettes and Hebrew honor society—my mom was president of that last one. She was also voted “Most Charming.” Yet, she never knew people adored her. After her twenty-fifth reunion, my mom said she was startled when classmates told her they had loved her. She was dismayed that she could have been so oblivious. Hearing her story, I vowed to be more aware.

On day five in the hospital, I’m alone with my dad in my mom’s room. She’s unconscious. She hasn’t spoken since she saw me in the hospital hallway the morning I arrived. My dad sits in a metal chair beside her bed and holds her limp hand clasped inside both of his. It’s so quiet. I sit on a chair in the corner. A plastic bag half-filled with bloody liquid dangles from the other side of her bed. Her breathing is infrequent, shallow. Breast cancer has nearly completed its awful task.

“Come here, Benj. I think this is it,” he whispers.

I walk toward my dad and stand to his right, by the bare soles of her tiny feet. She’s small in her hospital bed. Her cheeks are gaunt, almost hollow. Her sandy hair fell out months ago. She, my biggest fan, had become alarmingly old over the past few months. At sixty-six years old, she resembles a beautiful, ancient bird, motionless. Her mouth’s partially open.

It’s 9:42 p.m. here in West Orange, New Jersey, fifteen minutes from my childhood home. The sun set hours ago. Classical music plays softly from the clock radio resting on the windowsill. I wish it were the second movement of Beethoven’s Seventh, but it’s not. I wish the room were overflowing with fragrant lilies and jasmine. She loves those. She loves KitKats and frozen yogurt, and hot fudge. She loved walking Jack, our family’s Golden Retriever when I was a kid. She loves my dad. She loves my sister, Cathy, and her two children. She loves Addie and Leo. And Jackie. She loves me. I wish everything in this room weren’t so white, so linoleum, so bland. Empty. A fluorescent glow seeps in from the cracked-open door. Images from CNN flash across the muted TV screen overhead. I think back to our trip to Costa Rica.

We emerge from a brush-covered trail onto a hidden sliver of beach in Costa Rica. Ocean waves roll in, onto the early evening shore. The sky is orange-red. As though in a dream, three stallions appear on the beach. The horses trot across the sand, muscles rippling. We watch them gallop around the bend and out of sight. My mom puts her hand up to her mouth and I see she’s crying. “It’s just too beautiful,” she says. She kisses my dad.

Her breathing is barely perceptible. I take a breath, wishing I could breathe for both of us.

“Hello, Dr. Decter,” the night nurse says. My dad nods. He sees patients here at St. Barnabas on Wednesdays, his “Jersey day.” The rest of the week he commutes to Manhattan. Everybody knows him. The nurse leaves. There’s nothing for her to do. There is nothing for my dad to do. I wonder if it’s maddening for him to be powerless. I sit in the empty chair next to him.

Besides the room’s dim, overhead light, there is no LED glow from any machines or monitors. There are no high-pitched, rhythmic beeps. The monitors on either side of her bed were shut off this morning. We are past the point of medical intervention.

The spaces between her fragile breaths lengthen.

My dad and I have been the only ones here with my mom since the afternoon. Cathy has gone home to tend to her young family. Jackie, Addie and Leo are home in Los Angeles. I should have brought them. I feel more and more alone with each diminishing breath.

The hallway outside her hospital room is empty. There is only a yellow bucket with a mop rising from it.

Before she fell into unconsciousness, my mom grasped my hand when I reached for hers. She held it strongly and looked at me. That was the last time I saw her eyes. The blue was shocking against the white of her skin. It was unsettling how her gaze went through and beyond me. I hope she hadn’t felt abandoned when I moved to California after college.

It’s nearly 10 p.m. My mom manages another breath and my dad squeezes her hand. They’ve been married for forty years. I place my hand on his shoulder. My dad’s eyes lock on her face. My hand stays on his shoulder.

I flash back to December, when we were on what would be our last family vacation, in Mexico. My mom and I walked to the ocean together.

“I’m worried about you,” I say.

“Basically, I’m fine,” she says.

“Mom, even if you were dead and I asked you, “How are you doing?” you’d tell me, ‘I’m fine. Everything’s okay.”

“But everything would be okay, Ben.”

“That’s it,” my dad says in a soft, fractured voice. He touches her face and holds his hand there against her cheek. It’s the most intimate moment I’ve ever seen. “She’s gone.”

My eyes flood. Loud sobs wretch out of me. My dad emits lurching cries. I’ve never heard him cry. He stays with her while I walk into the hallway and call Jackie.

“My mom’s dead.”

Jackie bursts into tears. I love her for that reaction.

I walk back into the room and stand at the foot of my mom’s bed. My dad calls the nurse in to notate the time of death.

In this room, it feels as though my dad and I are the only two people left on the planet. He unplugs the clock radio he had brought from their house. He removes her shirt, pants, jacket, and leather shoes from the closet. I hold my open backpack for him. After he places the clothing and clock inside, I take her purse from beneath the bedside table. I grab my coat from the windowsill. I leave the bouquet of tulips that my sister had left by her bedside. My dad and I decide we will tell her the news in person.

I don’t know how much time passes before I turn off the light. My dad and I leave my mom’s body behind in the room, and walk together to the elevator, through the lobby and out into the empty parking lot.

We drive to my sister’s house in our separate cars.

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