Emily

On the other end of the phone with me, she was swallowing her last breaths, struggling to get words out as her lungs were filling with fluid. But she tried to speak with her gurgled, badly distorted words that sounded as if they were coming through water—which in fact they were. In these last moments of her life, my mother reappeared as a mother and as a lucid person, even through her garbled speech. She said to me two things that she had never said to me before. She said, “I love you. I am so proud of you.” Then she could no longer talk. I couldn’t hear her breathing anymore.

Never before had she told me she was proud of me. I was, of course, touched by what she said, and I deeply appreciated her honoring me with her last words. I so appreciated how in her last moments she was finally able to come out of the self-absorption that had overcome her for the past thirty years, and to show up as a real person with feelings and thoughts about me. For the first time I could remember, I felt like there was an “us.” I cried with a strange mix of gratitude and sorrow for the rest of the day.

I felt that she had redeemed herself, that she had brought herself back to life in those, her last dying moments. I felt that the person she had once been was here again, that her lost mind, which she had both carelessly given away but which also had been wrongfully stolen from her, had finally returned to her.

I was grateful and glad for her. Even though I cried deeply, I was not deeply moved in a transformative way for myself. I deeply, deeply appreciated her last words, that they were her last words, that they were to me, and that they were words of love, but while her words moved me, they did not change me; they did not penetrate my core.