As I type this, it seems to me that I had always known I would be standing over Mom's body, telling her my last goodbyes. It seems like such a huge, mythic event that I must have known about it beforehand, like Armageddon or the Crucifixion. But the truth is that I had no idea anything like that would ever happen. Mom was the linchpin of my universe, and she was always disgustingly healthy. When the Dean of Students came to get me out of my Renaissance Art class last April, my first puzzled thought was wondering what I could have unwittingly done wrong. Then I thought that one of my friends had committed suicide. When I heard one of my relatives was in the hospital, I assumed it was Dad. Dad is somewhat of a hypochondriac, and had just discovered that he had adult onset diabetes, so it made sense to think of him. When I heard it was Mom, I assumed that she had slipped and fallen, not that she was dying.

Sometimes I think that I could best define Mom's life by describing the hole she left behind. Obviously, John and I are missing a mother, and Dad is missing a wife and best friend. But Mom's mission in life was to make other people happy, and so her death has been mourned by people all over the nation. There are old people in her nursing home and on her floor who miss her little daily presents and vases of flowers. There are fellow activities workers who miss her jokes, her knowledge, and her piano playing. There are fellow church members who miss her organizational ability and her patience. She had so many friends and acquaintances that it seemed she would meet one of them no matter where we went.

This is Mom laughing with a resident in the nursing home where she worked. She always considered the residents "hers."

But a lot of people are beloved and all that jazz. Mom wasn't just beloved. She was really special. She was brilliant, for one thing, with a capacious and curious mind. Her social sensitivity was exquisite, which came from her habit of constantly putting herself in the other person's shoes. Of course every child thinks her mother can do everything. But Mom really could do almost everything (sports excluded). Back when she was a homemaker, she pickled things. She grew things. She even made her own soap once!

Mom was a very private person. Not many people realized how shy and humble she was in spite of her warm, people-oriented nature. Mom was more afraid of life than a lot of people are, but on the other hand she was more sensitive to it. Since she learned to drive very late and was never, ever aggressive, she was a terrible driver. The hardest thing for her to do was merge onto a freeway, so she would try to find a way to take city streets, or just not go to a function at all if it meant freeway driving. She was afraid of hurting people's feelings, and of offending anyone by action or omission. Her influence is what makes me feel the impulse to give up my bus seat and walk a mile so that someone else can sit there, or buy something I'm not sure about over the phone so I don't disappoint the nice telephone worker. Above all, she was afraid of What People Would Think. She's the one who told me never to wear the same outfit two days in a row, because people would think I had gone home with a Man and didn't have anything else to wear.

Mom was incredibly stubborn and self-willed, although she was muted in her expression of it, but usually her strong will mostly went towards mothering everyone around her. She and Dad had many clashes, though, which I always felt duty bound to try to smooth over.

She would brag about her children to whoever would listen (and to quite a few who wouldn't!). Her happiest days, I think, were when she had some new tidbit about me or about John to spread around her workplace. "Well, I hate to brag," she would start out saying, "but...," and then her voice would fill with love and pride as she would detail the latest wonderful thing that her smart child had done!

The Saturday after she died, the organ donation people called Dad up and told him that Mom had had massive lung cancer. It had evidently been a quick, nasty cancer, eating through almost all of her organs in a mere 18 months. Even though the cancer was so big, and had metasthesized, they only noticed it after they had already transplanted her liver into some poor volunteer firefighter in northern Minnesota. I hope he's doing OK. The rest of her organs were unusable even for research. That was the day Mom and I were going to go to our last Mother-Daughter Luncheon at St. Olaf together. We went my freshman and sophomore years, but my junior year my choir, Cantorei, had a function that weekend and so I couldn't go. Mom and I promised each other that we would go for sure my last year, and even though I thought briefly about backing out, since I had so much work to do that weekend, we still bought tickets. But instead of eating a festive lunch with me and listening to a sappy speaker about Mothers and Daughters, Mom was getting her liver cut out.

Several people have asked this. Mom never smoked a day in her life. She had no unsavory habits except crossword puzzles. Dad smoked for the first few years of their marriage, but then he quit. The only contributing factor I can think of to explain her lung cancer was that her Mantoux tests always came back positive, because she'd been exposed to TB sometime in her past, so she had to get a lot of chest x-rays to assure her employers that she didn't have active TB. Since she worked in a nursing home, her employers were understandably worried about this, and she had to keep getting the x-rays every year. Dad also blames preservatives in the food, microwave ovens, phone lines, air pollution, passive smoking, and self-sacrifice, some of which reasons are more valid than others, I think.

Dad chose to have a big traditional Catholic wake and funeral. When I got to the wake in the lovely new navy blue dress I'd bought especially for the occasion, only my family was there. The room was lined with flowers, and Mom's coffin was at the front. They had dolled her up and painted her face like marzipan. It looked nothing like her. Her neck was grossly swollen and caked with makeup to cover the skin discoloration. I had to go close to that thing and kneel down in front of it, and try to pray. I was only inches from it. It looked like a giant obscene frog. I almost threw up. I tried my best to pray, but I couldn't talk to God. I could only talk to Mom, and I knew that the thing in front of me wasn't her.

American funeral practices are barbaric, by the way.

The rest of the wake was beautiful because of the outpouring of love from all sorts of people. They just kept coming, and coming, and coming! We were mobbed by her admirers. For four hours I literally didn't have a minute to turn around. It all seems like a vague dream now, people's faces floating in front of me, always changing but always saying the same things.

I didn't cry in public. Instead I went for the overused stoic manner. I exchanged airy badinage with the doctors, and asked them about medical details. I would sit there muching my sandwich in the hospital room while they suctioned blood from Mom's stomach. I was asked twice if I was a nurse. When recounting this whole thing to others, I adopt the detachment of a moviegoer discussing a plot. You'd be amazed at how many people this has fooled. "I can't believe how well you're taking this, Catherine!" I've heard. The only response to that is a quiet smile, because obviously those people just don't get it.

Mom was tenderhearted, though. When she read us books (she read us books every day for our first 10 years or so), she would get all teary-eyed whenever anyone died, even a villain. Mom was the only person I've known who could cry over the defeat of Sauron, the Dark Lord! (She thought it was so sad that he had turned to Evil, and that he couldn't be saved.) John and I would laugh at her and tease her about this, but she couldn't help it!

On the other hand, it was impossible to tickle her. She would send me into spine-shattering paroxysms of shrieking pain by tickling me too much (I'm still very ticklish, and not in a good way). But when I tried to tickle her, directly on her bare feet, she would lie there on the couch and smile at me every so often to let me know that her nerves were keeping her updated on the tickling situation. So we teased her about that, too. We teased each other a lot and had more little in-jokes than I could ever hope to count.

I said goodbye to her there in the hospital's Cardiopulmonary Unit, part by part, the way she used to help me name my body parts when I was little. I started with her forehead and her beautiful hair, like a soft brown cloud with a silver lining. "I love your eyes," I sang to her quietly, "and your funny little ski-jump nose. And your eyebrows, and your smiling mouth, and your rosy cheeks. And your arms and your hands and your legs and your feet and your whole, whole body."

Dad had me go out and buy a scapular and a miraculous medal to pin on her hospital gown. He insisted to the nurses that she must have the medal on her person when they finally shut off the ventilator, after harvesting her organs. In my opinion, it was a little too late for all that.

Mom was adventurous in her youth, although still curiously shy and naïve. She went to Europe all by herself after she finished college, and she spent a summer in Mexico. One of her early jobs was sitting in a lookout station in a big national park, watching for fires. She loved architecture and culture of all sorts, and was immediately drawn to any ethnic festival or craft show in the area. It's one reason she refused to move to a small town, even though Dad really wanted to.

Mom and me in the Como Park Conservatory, where she took me to see the flowers. Look at her beautiful hair. She cut it off before I was old enough to remember it.

Mom's corpse in the hospital didn't scare me, even though she had bloodstains around her nose from the tubes, and even though her flesh was whiter and cooler than it should have been. The machines were still breathing for her, and it almost seemed that she was only sleeping. I could almost imagine her turning towards me in her sleep, curling her hand around mine the way she had been when I first got to her bedside. And once she had done that, she would crease her forehead in a little frown and open her eyes and look at me with those delightful brown eyes. Her body in the hospital didn't scare me the way it did at the wake. You should never have to be scared of your own mother.

Once when I was young I was running through the trees in Como Park. I could see Mom searching for me and I ran up behind her, closer and closer to her blue and white Norwegian sweater. For some bizarre reason I had the sudden flash that when she turned around to look at me, she would have the face of a wolf. I usually don't think of things like that. Seeing her corpse was like seeing the face of the wolf. It's sudden and shocking and completely wrong, but you have the nightmare sense that this has all happened before, and will go on happening.

When I first got to the hospital I found Dad and his sister Donna and his brother Kenny in a waiting room on the ground floor. After a long time, Dad and I went up to the place she was. After a little bit of that, Donna took Dad home to pick up his insulin. I stayed. I held Mom's hand, and although she was unconscious, she would twitch and tremble a little bit, and clutch my hand with her left hand. The doctors told us that a fragment of blood clot from her leg had lodged in her lungs. Once they had her stabilized, they wanted to insert a filter in the big blood vessel in her abdomen so that it wouldn't happen again. She was unconscious, and I was worried that when she came to, she would have lost mental functioning. During the resuscitation she had been without oxygen for several minutes, and her heart had stopped beating.

While Dad and Donna were gone, Mom's blood pressure started rising drastically. The nurses were bustling around her bed, changing which chemicals they were pumping into her. Mom's face got redder and redder, and her twitching got more and more frenzied. I didn't notice it, but there must have been a moment when all the twitching stopped. Her red color faded away, leaving her cheeks whiter than I'd ever seen them before, although still blotched with a deep, unhealthy maroon. Her blood pressure dropped, and so did the level of activity in the room. The nurses stabilized her. None of us knew what had happened. That was the moment when she really died, and I was the only one there. I'm glad I was there when she died, and (in a perverse way) I'm glad I was the only one there. Dad got to hear her last words, and I got to be there at the very end of her existence. My precious mommy. At least she never knew she had cancer, and never grew old.

Dad came back with his insulin and the kitchen radio. We turned on WCAL, "the public radio service of St. Olaf College," her favorite station. They were having an evening of Handel's Messiah. Of course they were! They played a recording of a rich, sweet alto singing "He Shall Feed His Flock Like a Shepherd," and Dad and I both started crying. I've never seen Dad cry before.

Mom's last words were "I'm... going... to...die," gasped out to Dad when he came back after his walk that day. Then she passed out. He had left her sitting on the couch downstairs sipping tea and reading "The New Yorker." She had just been released from the hospital several hours before, having been treated for blood clots in her leg. Dad went out for his walk. While he was gone she went to the basement and got the laundry, then climbed upstairs and started folding it. Isn't that typical of her! The first thing she does when she gets home from the hospital is some housework, folding Dad's laundry!

Dad and I are sure that she waited to pass out until Dad got back from his walk. She was too polite to die without taking proper leave.

For months Dad blamed himself. If only he hadn't gone on the walk. If only he had thought to make her promise not to move from the couch. If only he hadn't been wearing his Walkman, he would have heard her moaning earlier. If only he had gone to the bathroom upstairs, by the bedroom, instead of in the basement, he would have heard her moaning earlier. If only he had known CPR better. If only he hadn't lost control and started wailing and hyperventilating. There are too many if onlys. Poor Dad. He beats himself up too much.

I watched them perform another apnea test on her, the morning of April 18th. Dad and John couldn't watch, so they stayed in the conference room with the nice organ donation people. I watched the doctor, who was brusque and brisk and inspired my complete trust, as he shut off the ventilators, giving Mom one breath per minute. A machine monitored whether her brain had even the tiniest impulse to breathe. It didn't. It flatlined. It was then that I realized that she wasn't in the room.

I realize this is too long, and probably not interesting to anyone but me. To which I say, Screw it. This is my one and only mother we're talking about here, the one person who knew me best and influenced me the most. My best friend for years and years.

I'm not sure how much blood she used when she was dying. They kept giving her plasma, which has concentrated blood components in it. At the time I calculated that I'd have to donate at least 40 gallons to pay back into the system what she'd used. So I have quite a few to go, but I'll get there eventually. Mom would have hated to use any resources for herself, even if it was necessary.

I was very angry at Mom for a long time. I still am. After she died we found a diary of her medical symptoms. She hadn't gone to the doctor about any of these symptoms. She was wheeling herself around in a wheelchair at work because it hurt to walk, until the nurses told her that she must go to the hospital right away, since her pain was too intense to be a leg cramp. Mom had diagnosed herself as not being "really sick." She just assumed that her leg pains were caused either by a leg cramp or by shifting of the metal plates and screws she had in her ankle. (She broke her leg rather badly when I was about 8 years old.) And at the hospital they didn't look for underlying causes of the blood clot in her leg: they just assumed that it was caused by her estrogen therapy. Tumors can cause blood clots too, you know.

They gave her a CAT scan right when she was rushed to the hospital the second time, and they saw something in her lung. They just assumed it was bleeding caused by a blood clot that had dislodged from her leg. Personally, I think they saw her lung cancer but didn't recognize what it was.

Mom was too stubborn to admit that she wasn't a tower of strength. She always had to be the giving one, the strong one, the invulnerable one. Why couldn't she have taken her symptoms a little more seriously? Perhaps I would have had the chance to say goodbye to her when she was still conscious.

But in another way, I'm glad she didn't find out she had terminal cancer. It would have caused her too much suffering, and it would have destroyed Dad. And I didn't really need to say goodbye to her in person, because I know what she would have said, and she knew what I would have said. You don't need to say goodbye to yourself.

It's been over six months since she died, and I've healed in many ways. For one thing, I no longer have this helpless feeling that my soul is lying on the sidewalk, pumping out gallon after gallon of blood while people step over it. And I don't feel as callous and cut off from life as I did during the first few months. All these feelings are probably quite normal and understandable. They're probably outlined in every psych textbook. I can tell you one thing, though: the Six Stages of Grieving (or however many they have) are oversimplified. You don't feel denial, and then bargaining, and then anger, and then grief, and then acceptance. You feel them all at once.

Even the acceptance part. Except for during a few moments of howling grief the night of the 16th that I managed to smother under my quilt at home, some part of me accepted the whole thing as soon as I heard it. That's another reason it seems as if I had always known it would be this way.

Some part of me is still standing in that hospital alcove, with just a plastic curtain to hide my last farewells from the nurses' station, and a window that opens onto a gravel-paved roof and a solid brick wall. Some part of me is still looking at her body, the body that bore and nursed and loved me for decades, kissing her pale cool forehead. That part of me will always stand there, silent and waiting, still hoping that she will turn to me and open her eyes.