Laying Palms at Your Feet, Mother.

Two years ago on Palm Sunday, my sister and I are standing in The Blossom Shop in El Paso, Texas, buying a plant for our mother, palm leaves in our hands. And in her room, we will prop the palms against the sun-heated window in the rehab hospital where she will stare at them, half-heartedly, knowing the reverence, charm, time is gone.

It is early April and her stomach hasn't worked since the last day of February when a stroke fiercely infiltrated her brain stem. I know she is going to die. Mighty measures have been made to keep her alive. IVs with syrupy liquid, formulas to inspire her digestive system to process, and even my younger brother sending in a psychologist to evaluate whether she has given up, but I know my mother is at the end of her physical rope.

"What should we write on the card?" my sister asks and I go blank.

On Easter Sunday, my sister's pastor comes to call. We have taken mother home, to the bedroom she built on in at my sister's. And now I am her hospice caregiver. We line each side of her bed and a conversation carries on, but not directed to her. I want to send them all out. I can feel what she is feeling and I ask her when they leave how she is? "I know life goes on," she says, and my heart rips for her. But Nancy, my mother, it is weaker. Life is blander without you.

My mother (right) with her sister in Utah.

"Why do I always learn everything too late?" she says to me two days before leaving, before I watch her pulse cease, my sister and I breathless with her.

Two years later I dream of her. She is in my sister's and my bedroom, the one on Album Avenue, the one she made curtains for and dresser scarves. In the dream, she is drinking a Cappuccino, her head tilted back, drinking it with a sultry abandonment. Waking up, I know she is free, free from all her religious worries, food fears, and societal snubs. 

Life goes on.