(This story was published in the fine Hotch Potch Literature and Arts earlier this year. It is about six thousand words, thus presented in three parts–Leila)

April 2019

My mother died at either age seventy-nine or eighty-one, most likely the younger. Once upon a time, you could get away with hoodwinking the facts when records were kept on paper. What you needed to get one over was a strong set of lying skills. Although she was pathologically honest at the personal level, Mom was a first class liar as far as the record-keeping side of the world was concerned. It was an ability she needed to master early in her hectic life. The most impenetrable pettifogs of the world couldn’t throw her off a fiction no matter what the files said. She understood that a quality story has few moving parts. Windy-assed explanations, even truthful ones, just sound like bullshit. Active short sentences, eye contact, and a firm, clear voice are the best way to sell a whopper. Plus she was very pretty and knew how to use it.

Mom’s green card states she entered the USA in 1954, at the age of fourteen. Yet two years later, her marriage license placed her at eighteen. On top of that, she changed her name from Karen to Kaaren (after an actress she saw in a movie). She could have been legally married at sixteen but would have needed permission from her guardian. Mom was a Canadian orphan and a ward of the Catholic church. Considering she had run off, she figured that upping her age and marrying a sailor in the United States Navy was her ticket out of both the church and potential deportation (nobody, including Mom, knew why she was sent to America). She claimed that the green card was in error, which was tough to believe because she looked twelve in the picture. However and whatever, she got it over; when a lie settles in as authorized, it is the gospel ‘til the judgment trump blows.

“Don’t you dare try to feed me, Sarah–not unless you want to lose a finger.”

“Alright, Mom. Not like I’m missing out on a dream. They told me you refuse to eat.”

She snatched the spoon from my hand and flung it across the room. At least there was nothing in it.

A young Filipino CNA named Maisy had entered the room to straighten it up just in time to see the latest little melodrama unfold. She tutted playfully at Mom as she picked up the spoon.

“Sorry, Maisy,” I said, “she hasn’t had a cigarette since Tuesday. Makes her a little tense.”

Mom had been smoking since she was old enough to light one; she was a chainer who at her height sucked down four packs of Winstons a day. When advised to cut down, she switched to the 100s and knocked a half pack off her habit. I’d been sneaking her outside for a butt, but we got busted earlier in the week. Still, smoking had little to do with her death; her kidneys had decided to leave the party early.

“They tell me that you’re refusing dialysis too,” I said. With the perfunctory tantrum out of the way, it was time for me to address the real business at hand. I had been coming in every day after work for a month, after shortness of breath caused by excess fluid had landed her in the hospital. She was in that weird state of needing to get better so she could go to hospice.

“Love the way you keep going around my back,” Mom said.

Refusing dialysis made Mom a terminal case; the doctor asked if I could get her to change her mind or at least stop telling him to “fuck off” long enough to lucidly explain so she understood the consequences. She had a procedure done on her left arm the year before to make future dialysis possible (it was already coming to that) due to her lousy veins, but now she no longer wanted to go through with it.

I sighed. “Alright, Mom. It’s your life. Always has been. But could you at least say it plain to the doctor and quit the bullshit?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means you’re a selfish bitch, just like me,” I said, softly, my eyes firmly locked on hers. “I’ve always admired that about you–no shit. You do what you want–no hard feelings, anymore. But I’ve gotta tell you, to make sure you got it clear: rejecting dialysis means death, as in fucking soon and forever.”

Mom laughed, a bit of the old fire flickered in her eyes; the petulant child that had been around too long vanished. “They don’t call it death around here, Sarah—oh fuck-fuck no—it’s ‘an end of life event.’ Ain’t that so, Maisy?”

Maisy had finished thissing and thatting.

“So, we’re straight on that?”

She nodded. Mom’s face was always a perfect mask of what she wanted to convey. Rarely, save for scorn, was it an accurate match with what lay behind. But this time it was. And for the second time in my life, I understood the dreampurple light of death.

“Fuck it,” I sighed. “I’ll get you out for a smoke somehow.”

I went home after I took Mom out for two cigarettes. Surprisingly, we didn’t catch hell for that. I knew how Mom could get, so I figured the staff looked the other way and hoped the nicotine would improve her disposition.

At home, I tried not to think about it. My phone sat there, threatening to go off, waiting for just the right moment. But there was nothing else to think about and no one left to talk to.

In every family, there’s one person who has to clean up after the house lights come on. From about the age of two, after my father checked out by choice, I had only three other blood relatives, who fell off one by one, leaving just me. And it remained that way. No children, no unwanted arrivals of unknown cousins. Just the four of us: me, Mom, my little sister, Tess, and our Aunt Louise, whom we called “Anna-Lou.” She was actually an older cousin of my late father and not an aunt at all.

And there was Nora. She wasn’t kin, but calling her a friend has never been good enough, especially with Mom. Although Nora has been gone for fifty years, I can still hear her voice. She was from Oklahoma and said stuff like worsh instead of wash. She also had a way of renaming people and places. I was “Sister,” and Tess “The Kid.” She rarely called Mom by name, opting for common endearments like hon and dear. She called the White Pig Tavern, where she and Mom practically lived at on weekends, The Whore Museum.

She lived in an apartment in our building two floors up. But it was more like Nora and Mom’s room than an apartment. They did everything together. Both had been married once and never again. Our father committed suicide just after Tess was born, so we had no memory of him. Nora might still have been married for all she knew. She ditched the guy in Kansas and wound up here soon after. Both Mom and Nora worked for Howe’s Hardware and sometimes they dated men, but they were always older guys and the type that was easy to push around. None lasted long. For all intents and purposes, Nora and Mom were a couple; I honestly don’t know if that extended to sex. It really doesn’t matter. After Nora died, Mom (only either thirty-three or thirty-five) allowed no new people into her life.

Although Nora was not well educated, she had a keen mind and understood people. She knew things others couldn’t see. Mom begged her to tell us the Facts of Life, after I had my first period. At the end of the story (that she knew we already knew), she smiled, gave me a hug and whispered, “I know you needn’t worry about that shit, Sister—just kick everyone you don’t want in the balls.”

Nora was there at the beginning of my memory. She died at thirty-three. Cancer. Mom saw her out. For years, that was the worst day of my life, topped only by one other.

I thought about Nora more than usual as Mom’s “end of life” process unfolded. In many ways she probably should have been my mother because I was much closer to her than I was to Mom. Frankly, Mom and I didn’t like each other. We had similar personalities, thus we constantly and successfully explored each other for the things we hated about ourselves.

Even though I’m not the most sensitive person in the world, I will care about what I should care about. Still, don’t look to me to hold your hand and lie to you about angels and better worlds than this. But I can be counted on. I showed up for Tess, Anna Lou, and, finally, Mom. I figure my end will happen alone and won’t be noticed until someone complains about the smell. I think it’ll be better that way; I don’t want a socially awkward death.

Mom was always reluctant to give up center stage when she got it. And despite her refusal of dialysis, it took nearly three weeks to accomplish something that should have happened in one. Some say that nothing dies harder than an old lady. Maybe so. But I knew it would be a protracted scene because she was a one-of-a-kind creation, the type the gods are slow to kill.

The protracted death watch gave me a lot of time to visit the dungeon where I keep the memories I cannot kill clapped up.