…and suddenly everything gets a little serious.

That’s what is happening right now, and it’s the reason I haven’t been posting in the blog lately.

The news is not good. My mother–who is 76 and lives alone in Florida–has just been diagnosed with colon cancer. And even worse, the cancer has already spread to her liver.

Right now she is in the hospital, having had the obstruction removed from her colon, and I have spent the last 24 hours making arrangements to get down there to see her.

I’ve written about her before, how she has done so many wacky, crazy things–finger-painted her refrigerator, taken out a whole grocery store display by riding her scooter directly into it, gold-leafed the toilet seat. But I haven’t been able to truly explain what she’s like, how she can be both funny and impossible in the same second. The bad things: she has a quick temper, and she quite simply doesn’t have even one tiny scruple about anything. Ever. For instance, she has never bought a pair of sunglasses in her life; she simply walks into a store and trades her old ones for new ones, and is amazed when you tell her that’s not such a good idea.

The good things: She’s hilarious and adventurous and will do absolutely anything. She has had about a billion best friends in her life because she’s extremely talented at drawing other people to her. One time her then-best friend told me that being out in public with her was like walking around with a movie star: “Men just come over and try to give her things, try to help her with anything she needs, try to get her to go out with them. Now me, I could fall in the gutter and lie there with two broken legs, and there isn’t a man in the world who would even notice!”

Like a lot of mothers and daughters, we have not always gotten along. I always wanted her to be a little less insane than she perhaps was capable of being. And she always wanted me to just understand her the way she was and to laugh with her at all her antics and also to wear more eye makeup so that people wouldn’t guess that she was old enough to have a daughter my age.

So I am going down to be with her. We will try to figure out what’s best for her, when there’s no way to really know. Should she have chemo? She doesn’t want to, but the doctors are pressuring her to do it. Should she leave Florida and come to Connecticut, where at least we could be close to each other for whatever is going to happen? Should she go to stay near my cousin in North Florida, where at least the weather is still warm and where she has some childhood friends left?

And the big unanswerable question: how long do we have? And what do we do with the time we have left?

On the phone she said to me, “I don’t WANT to talk about all that. Here’s what I need you to promise: that when I’m dead, you’ll have me cremated and then I want you to rent a plane. It’s GOT to be a small plane, and you’ve got to rent it, and then I want you to fly across Crosby Lake and scatter my ashes. Don’t just throw them from the shore. I want them tossed from the air. DO NOT LEAVE ME SITTING AROUND IN A JAR. Do you promise?”

“We’ll figure all that out later,” I said. “I’m coming to see you.”

Maybe there will be some gift we can give each other in this awful, scary time. That is all I am hoping for, that out of the fear and the unknown, we can just sit together in her hospital room, grateful for the chance to be there in that moment. Maybe the eye makeup will come off, and we’ll just be who we are, sitting there facing the darkness. Together for a time, before it’s time to go rent the airplane.