August 17th, 17 years ago. 

I’d been home only a few minutes after an afternoon spent at my mother’s bedside when a feeling flooded me and I knew I had to be with her.

“I’m going back to Mom’s,” I called out to Bob. He appeared at my side and embraced me in a hug. “I’ll be home in time for dinner.”

It was 4:00 o’clock. I drove the two miles, my vision blurred by the water pooled in my eyes, spilling down my cheeks.

The moment I stepped through the doors of the small house where I’d moved my mom less than two months before, I knew I wouldn’t be going home soon. She was in an assisted care facility and had her own private room and bathroom. Her view of the lush backyard was infinitely prettier than what she saw from the bedroom in my house, where she’d lived the past six years. Moving her here had saved our relationship. No longer being her caregiver meant I didn’t have to tell her what to do, and she didn’t have to resent me for telling her. Free of conflict, we became nothing more than a mother and daughter who basked in enjoying each other’s presence and love.

I headed down the dim hallway, past the small den on the right and kitchen on the left. When I turned to enter Mom’s room, Julie was at the doorway, a blockade to my entrance. Before I could speak, she said, “Your mom will be dead by midnight.”

“What do you mean? Other than asleep all afternoon, she seemed okay when I left a half hour ago.”

“Things have changed.” Her voice was a whisper, her eyes downturned. She loved my mom. She wrapped me in a brief hug, then stepped aside.

I called Bob and told him I wouldn’t be home for dinner, Mom was dying, and I would be with her until there was no her to be with any longer.

Mom’s bed seemed farther away, each of my steps weighted as I moved towards her side where I’d spent the afternoon. A new sound was with us. All afternoon, she’d slept peacefully, and now her chest rumbled, roiled, and wheezed with each breath. I couldn’t see inside, but the sound of boiling water told me she was drowning. Dying. Dead soon.

I sat beside her bed and looked at the face I’d loved my whole life. My beautiful younger mother hidden within the face of an old woman near the end. The face of the one person I could say, without being facetious, that I knew inside and out. I started my life inside her belly where I swirled in her life-giving water. Now she was drowning in her water, and I couldn’t give her anything but my presence, my love.

She nodded, and not because of anything I said. I looked across the room to see if there was anything or anyone there. No one. Emptiness. This happened with random regularity for the next three hours until she died. She’d nod as though she’d heard something. I wondered if she was being given instructions. I wondered who they might be coming from and what they were.

Mom’s eyes remained closed, her chest heaving as her lungs struggled to breathe.

I told her she was a wonderful mother. I told her I loved her. I told her she could go and I would be okay. Mom probably knew the last one wasn’t true because she could always tell when I was lying. I hoped this time she believed me. I didn’t believe myself but understood she needed to know I would be okay. I’d miss her, I’d cry, but ultimately, I’d be okay. I told her with conviction, choking back the sadness beyond the pain living in every cell within my body and tightening around my throat.

Then I sang to her. I sang John Denver’s Perhaps Love because it told her that my memory of love would be of her no matter how long I lived.

And so, seventeen years later, on the 17th of August, I honor my beautiful mother, and I remember love.