A Long Goodbye to My Mother

As I approach the body I’ve shunned, I see it as just a body, my mother’s one-breasted, once beautiful, now fading body. No more perfume, just the smell of sweat and exhaustion, the smell of life leaving. No more wigs or false eyelashes or pancake makeup, just worry lines and freckles. I could have loved those freckles if only she’d let me see them. She lies there in a lace negligee, tiny in a queen-sized bed in the middle of her large, blue bedroom draped with heavy floral curtains, surrounded by mahogany armoires filled with her carefully curated wardrobe of sweaters and scarves, and multitudes of matching hats and shoes.

Now, while her body wages a fight without her consent, she is quiet and focused in a way I’ve never seen before. No more busy-all-the-time, no more running from appointment to appointment, person to person, in an agitated state of distraction. No more talking at me nonstop about people I don’t know. No more straining to make sense of her words, once described by my husband as “language on a holiday.” Her words are few, floating up from the mysterious depths of morphine-medicated pain. I hang onto these words. They are my last chance to know or say or be something different.

As she struggles for breath, she whispers, “Thank you for a wonderful life.” Does she believe she’s had a wonderful life? Or is she just being polite and saying the expected platitude? I never know with her where artifice ends and something livelier begins. But I am grateful for these words. They are an absolution of sorts, the gift of inclusion in her wonderful life. At one time, before the grinding resentments set in, I must have been a source of that wonder, though to admit this breaks my heart.

Our last night together and we are in her bed and she has my undivided attention. I can finally be the mother-daughter-twin sister she’s longed for. I say, “I love you” without dissembling. In the morning a nurse arrives as my mother