I should have known.  Maybe I did-but did not want to hear it.  I should have known when I got the first phone call indicating there had been a significant decline with my mother.  I should have known when the Chaplin repeated the same sort of statement in her calm and monotone-with a hint of grace way.  I am smart, alert and aware. Can it be that daughters know, just know when something is wrong? Yet, even with the carefully laid out statements to prepare me- it was not easy to actually see the decline.  My mom sitting there, catching her breath, looking so much like her own daddy when he became so sick.

“How are you mom?”

 I hug her boney body, releasing the scent of her recent Marlboro Light. Damn death, she will smoke as much as she likes-though now, she tends to hold the cigarette, in that way she does, more than she actually lights it.  She seems shorter, slower and on the fringe.  My daughter hugs her, tighter even, and notices none of this.  The joys of being 7.

And then, with her mental script that loops through her mind she says

” I am doing great!” with all the optimistic cheeriness of Marjorie Morningstar.  And then she begins the loop of her self preserving well scripted text.  Repeat.  Repeat. Repeat.  Her blue eyes don’t light up anymore.

There in the back seat of her car she and my daughter continue on with their ritual upon seeing each other.  The home health care worker tells me mom is having trouble breathing-except you’d never know it listening to the conversation in the backseat.  My 70 and 7 year old. Thick as thieves.  As many times as my mom asks my daughter the same questions, she answers as if it were the first time. From time to time I get asked a question as I drive the thirty miles or so back to the island my mom loves so well.  I know this will be the last time she will make the trip in to meet us at the airport.  I turn my thoughts from things like the words last and time and concentrate on what needs to be done while we are visiting.

My mother takes a pill to breathe, a pill to remember, a pill to strengthen, a pill to distress, a pill to whet her appetite, a pill to take away the anxiety, a pill to take away the cough.  Where is my better living through chemistry?  The all knowing, sometimes bitter, sometimes sweet pill to get through it all and remain in tact. My pill to be mindful, my own pill to remember, so I please, please don’t let me forget. 

I suppose the saddest thing-apart from knowing I am losing my mother is knowing I am losing a part of my own life.  Is this the defining moment in adulthood?  Am I all grown up now?  Am I to be medicated to make it through these next few months? To maintain-and up the emotional bandwidth of taking on death and then redefining a family.  To be there. To be prepared.  Do I continue on with the skills I have-some handed down by my mother-and stay busy until I get that phone call?  That phone call that even now, when the phone rings early in the morning or late, too late at night, I feel my throat tighten.  In my compartmentalized world, I am not sure where to store this, until.  Until.  The  until with my mother is in the day to day and the week to week.  Until.