Before the oncologist spoke to my family, the nurse had already requested that certain procedures be stopped. Daily vitals and turning to prevent bedsores. “We don’t want to keep calling him back if he is trying to leave us,” she said. I sat beside his bed pretending to myself that I was studying for a History final while my brother and mother sat in the waiting room.

I was not studying anything but my father’s breaths. They came further and further apart. I could not help looking up when the pause seemed to go on for minutes. Sometimes I would say softly after a long intake of air, “It’s okay, Daddy, you can go.” He had already been in a coma for days when they chose to let him go.

The oncologist said my father would probably die that evening, a Monday. The nurse said, “His heart is strong. I think it will be a few days.” I stayed a while longer to help Mom deal with practicalities and then drove back to Oregon the day before Daddy died on Thursday. I had two young sons and a husband at home who needed me.

My mother began a slow downward spiral years later and demanded increasing support from my husband and me. Our children were both grown by then, but she would not move in with us. So we stopped by her house several times a day. Sometimes she was in the hospital. Sometimes she was in assisted living. For one awful period she was in a nursing home. I read books about caring for a dying relative, but most were written by people who cared for and reconciled with someone during the last days or a few weeks of their live. I thought: You know nothing of what it means to do this for years.

I spent my fifties caring for my mother, and thankfully, my husband was right there, carrying half that burden. Frequent visits became daily, because three or four of five daily visits. One book about caregiving included a list of warning signs that the caregiver was in trouble. Were there fifteen or twenty signs in that list? I checked each one and laughed when I told Gary about it. What else could I do?

Mom and I had always been close. Her illness did not result in reconciliation because we were not estranged. It put a wedge between us, built of pain and exhaustion and dozens of ER visits. Early in her decline, before she was hospitalized the first time, I gave her a novel I’d written to read in draft, she got as far as page thirty-seven. “Is something going to happen, a murder or something? Because otherwise I cannot be bothered.” No, Mom, this is just about family drama. I know she was ill. I understood even then she never meant to be hurtful.

When I asked him to try to visit Mom more often, my brother stopped talking to me, told me I was “the most dysfunctional person” he knew. This was before his arrest, before court-ordered therapy, years before his diagnosis of BPD (borderline personality disorder), which may or may not be accurate. He has not spoken to me willingly for twenty years as of this coming July. When he had strokes last year, the news came second hand. I know his recovery is slow but I cannot call.

During these years, we tried being pet-less and failed. I gave up my lifelong habit of eight hours sleep, because I needed another hour each day. Gary and I stopped going to movies and watching television together in the evening. I ran every other morning before dawn. I entered an MFA program and wrote Friday through Sunday between scoring student essays. I revised Monday through Friday, when I was not teaching. Although I believed, and still believe, it is critical that I completed the assignments I gave to students, I excused myself from all but in-class writing. My students had never had a teacher who did the same work they did, so my announcement did not strike them as anything but peculiar. I posted all my MFA essays on the wall. Mostly, they went unread.

After my MFA graduation in 2007, as we headed for home, Gary said, “Are you done? Is your work done?” I said it was, and he told me Mom was back in the hospital.

This recalled my friend David, who died of AIDS ten years before. Gary waited till I’d mailed the last pages of the yearbook. “Are you done?” And then he told me.

Mom thanked me a few weeks before she died for “always doing what I asked you to do, even though I know sometimes you didn’t agree.” She laughed about that, but she also blamed me for the estrangement with my brother because she believed I was the one who needed to repair our relationship. I tried. Gary tried. We tried again and again. He blamed me too. I blamed myself.

Her last emergency hospital admission was not Mom’s first crisis. Once in the previous fall, again in winter, and then that summer she was hospitalized again. The doctor made us rewrite and sign her Advance Directive each time. It was hard for her. Most things became hard. She had not fully recovered from the previous hospitalizations. Even her friends said this while we were visiting her in assisted living. “She is not all the way back.”

I was the one who gave permission, signed the form the resident offered to remove life support after she began falling away that last time. It was in her advance directive. Mom told the nurse about her horses late that night. On the phone I told the nurse, She had no horses. But that dream reminded me of the mother I loved.

Her heart was strong but in another way. I thought she would not die soon, but I was wrong. She died the next morning while I was on a run. Gary met me in the yard when I walked up from the beach to tell me.

Her friend was with her and I am grateful she was not alone. I think that is the way she would have wanted to go. I tell myself that.

If she was leaving, I did not want to call her back.

Thanks to my dear husband, the greatest blessing of my blessed life, for always being there.