I keep falling out of blogging.

I mean to blog, even just if it’s to record these times, to write something I can look back on and remember after this is over. But then…well, everything changes so quickly.

And honestly? I’m about five-eighths of a wreck most of the time.

My mother seems to be fading more quickly than anyone had ever predicted. She seems like a shadow of who she was even last week, when she called me up and demanded, “WHAT, I want to know, is going to happen. How is it that I am going to change from being the vibrant, spirited person you hear talking to you…into being a dead person?”

We actually laughed together about that, she and I. How indeed! It seemed almost ludicrous, in a sick, sad way. She couldn’t be dying. Nobody who is dying could think in such a way. I guess I thought we’d keep laughing and joking and being so funny and real about death for a while to come.

When my father was dying, back in 1989, we weren’t allowed to mention it. It would have been impolite to point it out or to ask how it felt. His body was riddled with kidney, bone, and brain cancer, and yet he was going to be fine, and so we behaved that way, even as the ambulance drivers were taking him off to the hospital for the last time.

But in our daily phone calls, my mother has been talking about dying nearly non-stop. It is typical of her–irreverent and refreshing.

And her opinion of it? “It sucks.”

Of course it sucks. “But,” she said one night, “I am definitely planning on contacting you after I’m dead.”

“Are you?” I said, pleased. “What method do you plan to use? Should I get a ouija board, or go to a psychic? Or are you going to use props of nature, like coming to visit me on the breeze? Perhaps sending a special bird to chirp at me?”

She was silent for a moment. Then she said, irritably: “Don’t be silly. I am going to contact you by coming and sitting on the edge of your bed and talking to you! What do you think?”

But now these conversations have abruptly stopped. When I call her, after five minutes she says she’s too tired, the phone is too heavy, she wants to sleep. The nurses tell me she’s stopped eating, and she doesn’t walk to the bathroom anymore. She doesn’t want to do anything they suggest, like play bingo or take a shower.

“What happened?” I ask.

Nobody has any idea. The hospice social worker says to me gently, “Dear, they get to a point where they need to pull away. It’s a natural withdrawal from the world. She has to do this.” 

Last week I sent my mother a CD that I downloaded of her favorite music, songs by Andy Williams and Frankie Laine and Frank Sinatra, songs that she requested. But there was one song I didn’t want to record, because I told her it sounded too sad. I wanted her to have uplifting songs, happy songs that she’d always loved, songs we had danced to and sung along with on the car radio.

“But this runs through my head all the time,” she told me. And standing there at the nurse’s station, with all the hospital business going on around her, she started to sing it to me over the phone, softly and hoarsely:

“This time, Lord, you gave me a mountain…a mountain you know I may never climb…It isn’t a hill any longer, you gave me a mountain this time.” 

And then–well, we cried a little.