The bright moonlight casts our shadows on the sand.

The breakers gleam white, curling in the outgoing tide.

Leaping, pirouetting,

My beautiful daughter dances down the dark beach.

Sharon Lucille Johnson Hackett

April 13, 1932 - October 26, 2009

My mom.

My mother has stopped eating now.
She has difficulty swallowing even water.
We have called the family, my brother is flying in on Monday.
He will be here for two weeks.
My guess now is that is long enough.

At the end, now, there is really nothing else to do.
I can only cherish these last days in my mother's presence,
and bear witness to her quiet passing.

Today is a perfect October day.

The sun is shining in a cloudless blue sky,

the morning chill has warmed up to midday.

We've had enough cold nights to turn the leaves,

and they are beautiful, turning every street and yard

into picture postcard autumn scenes.

I put aside my concerns and go for a walk.

It feels good to move, to let go of stress and grief,

to notice the trees, and people's gardens, 

the dogs down the neighborhood who usually go ballistic when I pass by, 

but don't today. 

I walk through the graveyard, past the big pine trees - my favorite -

pine needles crunching underfoot, 

and pause under the snaggly old chestnut tree

to fill my pockets with shiny plump brown chestnuts.

The greatest of these is love

My mother is now non-ambulatory and largely non-verbal.

When she does speak it is usually very soft,

and she does not articulate well enough to be understood.

We now have to feed her most of the time.

She isn't eating much.

My father tries to get her to eat, kisses her and calls her pet names.

He carries her to her chair, the bathroom, the bed.

She hallucinates much of the time, quietly now,

but otherwise is still self-aware and knows who we are.

I say "Hello, Mama, I love you!"

and am rewarded with a smile, a murmured "I love you too, darling"

that is only just recognizable.

This is all she has, now.

It is true, that 'the greatest of these is love'.

In the end, when everything else has gone, my mother still has love.

It's the only thing in her life that has lasted

and pretty much the only part of her that we can hold on to.

I see the world differently now.

One
foot
in
front
of
the
other
I can do that
One
foot
in
front
of
the
other

My mother is in worse shape than ever.

She shuffles past, clinging to my father's hands - 

this is maybe her 4th or 5th trip past me.

Hi mom, I say. Going to sleep?

No, she replies, I'm going to go where I'll be sane.

Earlier - when I tried, fruitlessly, to get her to settle into bed - 

she informed me that she was a skillet. 

It's funny, in a tragic way. 

We have finally learned that she has a urinary tract infection,

which for whatever reason none of her doctors have spotted till now

(despite the fact that it was the first thing my osteopath asked about,

months ago)

and we have been unable to get the antibiotics that the doctor's office

was supposed phone in to the pharmacy before the doctor

left on vacation.

They never called them in. Their office is closed.

So my mother has been roaming almost non-stop all weekend,

hallucinating day and night,

shedding so much weight over the weekend that this afternoon

I was able to scoop her up in my arms to set her into her bed.

It hadn't occurred to me till just now that we should have gone straight to the

ER, and had the doctor there give her antibiotics.

When people talk about the broken healthcare system,

Where do we figure in plain old incompetence on the part of the provider?

How much more does she - do we all- have to suffer through?

Years of this, apparently.

I wish for her doctors to have this same experience, up close and personal.