I sat up, suddenly wide-awake. It was time.

I jumped out of bed and dressed quickly, glancing at the clock; it was almost 3 a.m. I went to the bathroom where I brushed my teeth and washed my face. My hands were shaking ; my teeth chattering. I stopped for a moment to look at myself in the mirror, to compose myself. It was an odd feeling to see my face. I knew that from this time forward, things would be different.

I ran downstairs where I found Tito and my Aunt Val talking quietly to each other. My aunt had arrived from Oregon two days earlier, and had been staying with us in our busy communal home. I didn’t know her very well; I had met her when I was a child and my memory was of a nice, pretty blonde lady in a pale blue chiffon dress. I thought she was an angel. Little did I know that she would really turn out to be one.

The three of us collected ourselves and went to the car. We made our way through Seattle and got onto the freeway, the roads were empty. We drove in silence, with just the whir of the car heater and pools of yellowish light from the street lamps casting their glow at regular intervals across the windshield. It was hypnotic, no one spoke; we were all lost in ourselves.

The endless corridor with the green tile floors, the occasional noise of someone snoring, the squeak and sigh of a chair as a body shifted. We found our way to the room and pushed open the door.

It was a queer sound, like a humidifier that mother would put in my room when I had a bad cold; a bubbling, gurgling sound. A light was on in the corner, a few chairs next to the bed. We moved slowly across the room, Tito’s hand on my shoulder, steadying me, my aunt’s hand in mine. There was my mother, with an oxygen mask over her face; eyes almost closed, her mouth slightly open. Her terry cloth turban was missing and her head was uncovered and bare, it looked cold. She had no hair. It had been gone for awhile. I touched her arm; her skin felt cool and waxy, thin like paper.

I asked the nurse, “What is that sound, are you trying to keep her alive?” She looked at me. “ Your mother is making the sound. It’s normal. We are just giving her some oxygen to make her comfortable.”

A normal sound? This...rattling, gurgling? It didn’t seem normal at all. I looked at Tito’s face, his eyes were wide. A single word came out of his mouth: “Ohhhh”

We sat in the chairs close to the bed and talked. We tried to speak about normal things, what the weather had been like, what it would be like today, what we had eaten for dinner the night before. We sat and watched and waited. Every once in a while my mother would shift or moan and we would all stop breathing for a moment and sit perfectly still, waiting for a word, a smile, anything. Sometimes we would talk to her. My aunt and I took turns touching and stroking her arm or her face.

The hours passed quite quickly, morning came and sunlight and the sound of birds warmed the room. The noise of the nursing home coming alive, a doctor being paged, someone coughing, cars on the street outside, people driving to work. It all seemed so... ordinary.

The gurgling sound became worse and my mother seemed uncomfortable. I called for a nurse and she got the doctor, who came to examine her. When he finished he gave the nurse some instructions, then gestured me to follow him. We left the room and he said to me, “It won’t be long now.” My aunt joined me at the door as he walked away and I told her what he had said. My aunt became quite serious, a little intense. She told me that everything would be fine, that she had gotten my mother to accept Jesus Christ as her savior the day before, that my mother would go to heaven. My aunt Val was a very religious woman, and while I wasn’t and her words disturbed me, I accepted it. I figured, okay, at least we have all the bases covered.

I can’t tell you what happened the last 30 minutes of my mother’s life, but I can tell you about the last five of them. I don’t know how we knew, we just did, and this was it. My aunt said “Go to her Laney, talk to her tell her she can go”. I held my mother as best I could. Her body was so strange to me, she had always been warm and soft and comforting, now she was nothing but skin and bones. It was hard to touch her. I leaned in close, speaking softly and evenly into her ear, “Mom, it’s all right, you can go now, I will be okay. Aunt Val is here with me; it’s time for you to go. You don’t have to worry about me. I love you. I am safe. Please don’t be afraid to go. I am right here with you.”

And with those words, after a 14-month battle with cancer, my mother stopped breathing and her heart stopped beating at 9:00 am, May 22, 1990. She was 71 years old.

Adrenaline and exhilaration like nothing I have ever known coursed through my body. Tears of sadness and happiness ran down my face, and I remember laughing and hugging my aunt and the two of us wiping the tears off each other’s cheeks. My aunt and I went to kiss and hug my mother. My fingers touched her eyelids, trying to close them, I smiled when I saw that it didn’t really work like in the movies, her eyes wouldn’t stay shut. I left them be. It seemed silly anyhow, trying to do something I had seen a dozen times on the screen. This wasn’t the movies.

The day my mother passed on was a beautiful spring day, sunny and warm. Tito took us home and fed us tea and muffins. There was a brief moment of strangeness for me as we sat eating in the kitchen, the three of us talking about my mom, the person that she was, things she had done. On the kitchen wall there was a huge mirror and every now and then I would glance into it to see the reflection of us, kind of like it was a window into someone else’s house. I saw something I can’t quite describe, and truth be told, it wasn’t that pleasant: my mother’s face in my face, my mother’s hands in my hands, part of them, intermingled with me. Not the warm soft face and hands I knew to be my mother but the gaunt, bony shell that held my mother’s soul at the very end. It was terrifying and compelling all at once, I couldn’t bear to look or look away. And then it was gone as quickly as it had come. I was back to...me.

I could have chosen to honor the memory of my mother by telling you something about her, the person she was and the life she led. But what would that have meant to you, really? All of our mothers mean something to us, she was no more or less special then anyone else.

It is her absence from my life that tells me what I was given by her. The years I have spent not being able to share things, my triumphs and failures alike. The person who hasn’t been there to call up to ask for a recipe or what to do when I have an earache. The laughter that is no longer there, the unconditional love and acceptance. While she was living I took her for granted, and that’s okay, I didn’t know better. But in the many years after her death I can see clearly how valuable she was to my development as a human being. How valuable she still is.

Somehow I think it is quite fitting that the first words ever spoken to me were from her lips and the last words she heard came from mine.